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

Advanced design with CUBE functions

This section covers the CUBE functions available in Excel. This functionality allows you to operate on data from Analysis Services without using PivotTables or PivotCharts. These techniques are advanced and require basic Multidimensional Expression (MDX) skills. However, we will walk you through the simplest way to learn and use these functions initially.

We will use these functions to create the following three single-value visualizations on our dashboard:

  • Total black items sold in the selected period
  • Total blue items sold in the selected period
  • Black and blue items sales amount in the selected period

In the next sections, we will walk through the steps to add these measures and apply the timeline filter to them.

Adding PivotTables to a new sheet

Let's begin by adding PivotTables:

  1. In our multidimensional workbook, add a new sheet.
  2. Add another PivotTable to this sheet (Data | Existing Connections ...