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 Power BI visualizations using live connections

Let's start creating our Power BI visualizations using the recommended connection method – live connections. We will review more details about this connection type versus the import method in the next section.

To get started, we will need to create Power BI Desktop files to support each model type:

  1. Open and save two Power BI Desktop files – WideWorldImporters-MD.pbix and WideWorldImporters-TAB.pbix.
  2. When you open a new Power BI Desktop file, you will see a splash screen with some information on it. Go ahead and close that window. Both desktops should look similar to the following screenshot when you are ready:

Figure 10.1 – New Power BI Desktop Window

Remember, your Power BI Desktop surface may be different than the one we have shown in the preceding screenshot. In most cases, the core functionality we will be exploring in this chapter should be possible in...