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

Chapter 5: Adding Measures and Calculations with MDX

Now that we have the cube built, the time has come to enhance it with MDX. MDX, or multidimensional expressions, is the language used to query a multidimensional model and build calculations in the cube. In this chapter, we will introduce the core concepts of MDX for building measures, calculations, and queries. While MDX has some similar syntax and structure to SQL, the implementation and results are not similar. We will use MDX to expand the functionality in the cube with measures, calculations, and KPIs. Measures and calculations can be used to standardize business metrics for all users. KPIs, or key performance indicators, are used to visualize performance and trending against specified goals.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

  • Introducing MDX basics – SELECT, FROM, WHERE
  • Adding calculations and measures to your cube
  • Adding KPIs to your cube
  • Exploring more MDX expressions...