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

Discovering how your models are performing

Several open source tools are available to support monitoring and performance tuning in Analysis Services. When working with multidimensional models, many of the tools are many years old and may not have been updated recently. Multidimensional models are very mature and have experienced little change in the past few years. Tabular models have some key tools that can help you monitor and improve the performance of your models. While all the tools are not covered in this section, we will bring up some industry accepted tools in the topic list at the end of this chapter.

While those tools exist, you should be aware of out-of-the-box capabilities with SQL Server. This includes the maintenance views and even performance monitoring.

Using Dynamic Management Views

Dynamic Management Views or DMVs are available for both multidimensional and tabular models. While the entire list of DMVs is out of scope for this book, we will introduce you...