Power View Connectivity to Multidimensional (DAXMD) Released

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Microsoft released Cumulative Update 4 for SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1. This is more than a regular cumulative update as it includes enhancements to both Power View and Analysis Services to support connecting Power View to OLAP cubes, also known as DAXMD. For more information, read the official announcement by the Analysis Services product group. Now, business users can easily author ad-hoc reports and interactive dashboards by leveraging your OLAP investment. As a proud contributor to the DAXMD TAP program, I’d delighted with the results as I discussed in my blog “DAXMD Goes Public”.

I hate to dampen the spirit but be aware that only the SharePoint version of Power View has been extended to support Multidimensional. We don’t know yet when the same will happen to Power View in Excel 2013. Anyway, this is a very important BI enhancement and it’s time to plan your DAXMD testing and deployment.

Microsoft Kerberos Configuration Manager for SQL Server

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Anyone who has gone through configuring Kerberos knows that it’s not fun. After having done a few installations, my personal record for configuring Kerberos for SharePoint, SSAS, SSRS, SQL Server, and PerformancePoint was 4 hours but I had all parties including the AD administrator in the same room. In an attempt to facilitate troubleshooting Kerberos, Microsoft released Microsoft Kerberos Configuration Manager for SQL Server. It’s a simple diagnostic tool for troubleshoot Kerberos issues related to SQL Server.

Once you install and start the tool, you connect to the desired instance (requires SQL Server standard authentication to a remote server). Then, the tool checks the service account and discovers what SPN’s are registered for that account and what delegation options are configured in Active Directory. If it finds inconsistencies, it is capable of generating a script that your AD administrator can run or applying the fix interactively.

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As a side note, be aware that if Kerberos doesn’t work, SSRS, Power View, and PerformancePoint 2013 supports SSAS authentication using EffectiveUserName.

Best Practices for Implementing Enterprise BI Solution at SQL Saturday 2013

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SQL Saturday 2013 in Atlanta was a raging success. Some 555 people attended which made it the most attended SQL Saturday even ever. I’ve uploaded the slides from my presentation “Best Practices for Implementing Enterprise BI Solution” to the Prologika site and Slideshare. The presentation had a great attendance and reviews. Thanks to everyone who attended it and it was great meeting all of you!

“Learn best practices to make your organization a center of BI excellence! I’ll walk you through lessons learned during our implementation of an enterprise end-to-end BI solution. Working experience with the dimensional modeling and the Microsoft BI stack is assumed.”

Leveraging Data to Revolutionize a Mature Business by Bijal Patel at Atlanta BI Group on May 20th

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Due to Memorial Day, we’ll move our next Atlanta BI Group meeting to May 20th. The meeting will be sponsored by Strategy Analyzer. Our speaker will be Bijal Patel (Director of Data and Integration Services at Cox Media Group) and the topic is “Leveraging Data to Revolutionize a Mature Business”.

“Learn how the integration, management and analysis of data is helping Cox Media Group reinvent its business model. Leveraging SSIS, BizTalk, MDS and several other leading technologies, Cox Media Group is finding new ways to reach its customers and deliver innovative media products and services to its established customer base.”

This looks like a very interesting “from the trenches” presentation given the experience of the speaker and the business of its organization. I hope you can join us. Please register and RSVP on the Atlanta BI Group website.

Presenting at SQL Saturday in Atlanta

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I’ll present at SQL Saturday in Atlanta on May 18th. Initially, I was planning to talk about dashboard options with the Microsoft BI stack but the organizers had a call for more advanced content. To accommodate this request, I’ll present Best Practices for Implementing an Enterprise BI Solution where I’ll share proven practices harvested from real-life projects.

“Learn best practices to make your organization a center of BI excellence! I’ll walk you through lessons learned during our implementation of an enterprise end-to-end BI solution, which is discussed in the Records Management Firm Saves $1 Million, Gains Faster Data Access with Microsoft BI case study published by Microsoft. Working experience with the dimensional modeling and the Microsoft BI stack is assumed.”

I’m looking forward to seeing you on May 18th.

Default Parameters in Power View

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Scenario: You need to configure a Power View report to show data for a dynamic date, such as the current date or the last date with data. However, as it stands Power View doesn’t support expressions.

Workaround: Add a Boolean calculated column to the Date table that returns TRUE for the date of interest. For example, if you want the report to show data for today’s date, the expression might be:

=if([Date]=TODAY(), True, False)

where [Date] is the column with date data type. Then, use this column as a filter in Power View.

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Unfortunately, this workaround has a significant limitation. If the report needs another filter on the Date table, such as to allow the user to overwrite the default filter on the current date, this approach won’t work because filters on multiple attributes are interpreted as an AND condition (Date is 1/1/2013 AND TodayDate=True). Inability to specify OR filter condition between attributes is another Power View limitation. So, users needs to be trained to use either the TodayDate or Date filter but not both.

Looking ahead, it will be nice if Power View supports VB or DAX expressions as regular SSRS reports do.

Many thanks to Darren Gosbell for suggesting the workaround.

Best Practice and Creative Data Visualization by Jen Underwood for Atlanta BI

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It looks like Atlanta BI Group will have a record attendance tonight with 74 people registered! Jen Underwood will present Best Practice and Creative Data Visualization.

This fun, informative, and inspirational session covers both best practices and creative options for data visualization. We will showcase data visualization techniques in Excel, Power View, Reporting Services, Visio, and a variety of other Open Source projects and Third-Party data visualization offerings. The possibilities are endless with the right mix of tools, tips, and tricks.

Windows Azure Infrastructure Services

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Microsoft announced today the availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services which is a collective name for running Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks in the cloud. Scott Guthrie’s blog on this subject is very informative. Pricing get slashed too to be competitive with Amazon. What’s interesting is that these cloud VMs can be configured as an extension to your existing network. In the BI world, this would allow us to source data from existing on-premises data sources albeit probably over a much slower connection, such as to host your ETL, data mart and SSAS in the cloud or just the analytical layer. Speaking of connection speeds, the Azure bandwidth is actually good (5-15 GB/s) although it’s likely that is likely you’ll hit a bottleneck with your ISP on your way to and back from the cloud.

And, speaking of BI, check the SQL Server Business Intelligence in Windows Azure Virtual Machines document if you’re interested in cloud BI deployments. Notice that there are VM templates that install SSRS (native mode), SSAS (Multidimensional), as well as SharePoint 2013 but you can install manually the other components as well if you need to, such as Tabular. Microsoft recommends Extra Large VM size for BI deployments although its memory capacity (14 GB) might be on the lower end especially for Tabular.

About Tableau 8

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Jen Underwood highly recommended I attend the Tableau 8 tour on Tuesday to witness firsthand its new features. Naturally, I couldn’t resist of comparing everything I saw with Microsoft BI. I took some time after the pretention to take 8.0 for a spin and reconfirm my understanding. Here are the top five things I liked about Tableau.

  1. Simplicity – A few months ago, I blogged about my top 5 Microsoft BI wish list. My number 1 wish was a continued focus on integration and simplification. Tableau 8.0 nailed it down as far as simplicity, at least on the visualization side of things. One desktop tool and its server-based counterpart. A tool whose sole purpose is BI. Not something that was bolted on another tool as a BI add-on. No layers to integrate with and configure on the server side, and error logs to sieve through.
  2. Visualization – Visualizations are yet simple and powerful. The presenter was quick to point out the areas where the tool excels in comparison with Power View. Tree maps and bubble maps were all over the place, as well as the ability to customize them, e.g. change the color of a pie slice. I liked the ability to dynamically group items (similar to custom MDX sets in Excel). For example, the presenter lassoed a bunch of cities in North America and created a North America dynamic group that was subsequently used to analyze sales. Another interesting in-the-box feature is ability to forecast data. In the Microsoft world, this would require some flavor of data mining (not a native feature in both Excel and Power View).
  3. Mobility – This is one area where Tableau has at least a year lead over Microsoft BI (see my number 2 wish item in the above blog). Once the dashboard is published to the server, it can be viewed and edited on mobile devices (iPad was demonstrated). By contrast, due to its Silverlight nature, Power View is currently supported only in Internet Explorer. However, as we’ve heard at conferences, Microsoft is hard at work to change this.
  4. JavaScript API – Developers creating web applications can integrate and embed interactive Tableau content into their applications via the new JavaScript API.
  5. Data reach – Apparently, Tableau customers are asking for specialized connectors to cloud data and emerging data sources. Version 8.0 introduces connectors for Salesforce.com, Google Analytics, Hadoop, SAP Hana, etc.

Being a self-service BI tool, in my opinion the backend is where Tableau trails behind Microsoft BI, including:

  1. No continuum for self-service to organizational BI – While you can publish a workbook to the server, you can’t upgrade the workbook to an organizational BI model. Nor can you connect to a published workbook as a data source, e.g. by using Excel as a front end.
  2. In-memory engine – Based on my experiments, xVelocity (the in-memory engine of PowerPivot and Tabular) excels the Tableau in-memory technology both in compression and speed.
  3. Programming – Tableau supports custom calculations but the potential is not even close to what you can do with DAX. For example, I couldn’t find a way to use many-to-many relationship (not natively supported in Power Pivot but can be handled with DAX formulas).
  4. Scalability – I haven’t tested the server edition yet but I would expect Analysis Services to scale much better than Tableau due to the desktop origin of the latter.
  5. Security – Tableau supports action-level security, e.g. allowing the user to edit workbooks, and basic user filters that allow user access to specific members, such as Bob can see only USA. There is no dynamic data security.
  6. Usability – Besides the presentation layer where Tableau excels, I’ve noticed areas that would be surprisingly difficult for a self-service BI tool. For example, there isn’t option to visualize tables and relationships in a diagram view. For some obscure reason (I guess so it knows what to aggregate and not), Tableau insists on separating entities as dimensions and measures. Tableau stores data and connection definition as external files, and maintains connections per entity. For example, I couldn’t find a way to import more tables using the same connection definition.

In summary, choosing between Tableau and PowerPivot for self-service BI would require careful examination of requirements and comparing pros and cons of the two. On the corporate BI side of things, you should definitely consider Tableau as a front end to Analysis Services if you need an alternative to Microsoft Excel and/or Power View.

Data Warehouse Physical Design Best Practices Session by Carlos Rodrigues at Atlanta BI Tonight

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It looks like Carlos will deliver another slam tonight with a record number of some 63 people registered and counting… Join our Atlanta BI meeting at 6:30 to see his Data Warehouse Physical Design Best Practices presentation.