After a few years of extensive development and beta testing, Tableau announced its data preparation tool (Tableau Prep) for "redefining your data prep experience". Previously, Tableau relied on other vendors, such as Alteryx, for self-service data preparation. Naturally, I wanted to take it for a spin and compare it with the Microsoft Power Query (available for free in Power BI Desktop and Excel), which has…
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MS BI fans, join us for the next Atlanta MS BI and Power BI Group meeting on Monday, April 30th at 6:30 PM. Patrick LeBlanc will do a deep dive into Power BI Report Server. TEKsystems will sponsor the meeting. And your humble correspondent will demo several latest Power BI features: buttons and Q&A. For more details, visit our group page and don't forget to RSVP (use the RSVP survey…
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Analysis Services normally requires a live connection between the client and server. If the connection is interrupted, the server considers that the client has lost interest and cancels the running operation.Strictly speaking, there is a 'long running operations' (LRO) protocol built over the HTTP XMLA messaging protocol which mitigates the issue of disconnects by attempting to keep alive the request/responses. This helps avoid the HTTP…
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None of the Multidimensional and Tabular semantic models I've implemented required scaling out, but I understand that some scenarios might benefit from it, such as B2B or B2C reporting. Depends on the implementation approach, another benefit could be implementing a highly available farm. Implementing a scaled-out, on-premises SSAS farm is not easy. There are different techniques but all of them involve a compromise between availability…
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Object-level security (OLS) is a frequently requested security feature when implementing semantic models. For example, a current project disallows some sales persons to see sensitive measures, such as Margin and Profit. In Multidimensional, modelers could use cell security to meet such requirements with the risk of compromising performance. Starting with SQL Server 2017 (compatibility level 1200), Tabular supports object-level security to disallow access to entire…
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Thank you to everyone attending the Power BI workshop by Prologika yesterday. We had great turnout with more than 50 people from 30 companies attending the event at the Microsoft Technology Center in Alpharetta! The key takeaways were: Many companies transition to Power BI because of its great value-to-cost proposition. PowerQuery is a fantastic tool for data cleansing and transformation that is missing in other…
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In my "Notes on Analysis Services Performance and Parallelism" blog, I shared limited performance results about scaling up Azure Analysis Services Tabular. As I mentioned, I expect the same findings to apply to SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular for on-premises deployments. As the official load test results came in, I'm ready to provide more info and general recommendations. We load tested the AAS semantic model mentioned in…
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As a part of a semantic model assessment, I got to experiment with different configurations of Azure Analysis Services. In this case, the largest fact table has almost 2 billion rows so it's a good size model. I was particularly interested the correlation between a higher performance tier and query performance. One thing that I like about PaaS is that it's easy to change and…
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