Book Image

Hands-On SQL Server 2019 Analysis Services

By : Steve Hughes
Book Image

Hands-On SQL Server 2019 Analysis Services

By: Steve Hughes

Overview of this book

SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) continues to be a leading enterprise-scale toolset, enabling customers to deliver data and analytics across large datasets with great performance. This book will help you understand MS SQL Server 2019’s new features and improvements, especially when it comes to SSAS. First, you’ll cover a quick overview of SQL Server 2019, learn how to choose the right analytical model to use, and understand their key differences. You’ll then explore how to create a multi-dimensional model with SSAS and expand on that model with MDX. Next, you’ll create and deploy a tabular model using Microsoft Visual Studio and Management Studio. You'll learn when and how to use both tabular and multi-dimensional model types, how to deploy and configure your servers to support them, and design principles that are relevant to each model. The book comes packed with tips and tricks to build measures, optimize your design, and interact with models using Excel and Power BI. All this will help you visualize data to gain useful insights and make better decisions. Finally, you’ll discover practices and tools for securing and maintaining your models once they are deployed. By the end of this MS SQL Server book, you’ll be able to choose the right model and build and deploy it to support the analytical needs of your business.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Choosing Your Model
4
Section 2: Building and Deploying a Multidimensional Model
8
Section 3: Building and Deploying Tabular Models
12
Section 4: Exposing Insights while Visualizing Data from Your Models
15
Section 5: Security, Administration, and Managing Your Models

Creating calculated tables

Calculated tables in tabular models are built using DAX and purely calculations. Calculated tables allow you to create role-playing dimensions, filtered row sets, summary tables, or even composite tables (made from columns of more than one table). We will demonstrate the use cases in this section.

Creating a delivery date table to support role playing

In our model, we have used two dates – Invoice Date and Delivery Date – in the Sales table. We have been using Invoice Date as our primary date in the model. This means that in order to refer to Delivery Date in calculations, you need to use the USERELATIONSHIP function. Both Invoice Date and Delivery Date are related to our Date table. However, only the relationship with Invoice Date is active.

You can visually identify inactive relationships in the Diagram view. In the following screenshot, you can see the two relationships. The inactive relationship is signified by the dotted line...