Business Intelligence (BI) used to be a competitive advantage for businesses that could afford it. Today, BI is increasingly becoming a fundamental and critical function of every business, which means it can no longer operate on an exclusively strategic basis. Also, it must be responsive to changing business needs in a time frame that allows the business to address those needs. The demand for more responsiveness (less time to implement) of BI continues to increase in parallel with the demand for more functionality.

In response to this increasing pressure on BI to perform at "Business speed", a new capability has emerged in the form of Self-service BI. These Self-service tools allow business users to acquire and analyze data from a variety of sources according to their specific needs at that moment. There are challenges and concerns that come with giving this capability to business users. We'll discuss these in detail in this chapter, but Self-Service BI is a good and growing solution to an important business need.

Microsoft's offerings for Self-Service BI include tools such as Power Pivot, Power View, and Tabular Models in Analysis Services. These tools continue to gain acceptance and are an increasingly presumed capability in Microsoft BI environments. It's not always clear, however, what precise mix of these tools, along with multidimensional cubes, relational data marts, and other presentation tools such as Excel and Reporting Services, would be optimal for any given situation.

There are a large number of variables in determining this optimal mix and we won't be discussing all of them in this cookbook. Our focus will be on the choice between and recipes for implementing Multidimensional cubes and Tabular Models.