A Case for Azure Analysis Services

Microsoft BI practitioners have three options for hosting semantic models: SSAS (on prem), Azure Analysis Services (cloud), and Power BI (cloud). AAS is somewhat caught between a rock and a hard place. Given that Power BI gets the most attention for cloud deployment, why would you consider AAS at all? There are two main reasons:

1. Cost – Organizational semantic models might require a lot of memory and crunching power. Hosting them on AAS might be more cost effective. For example, AAS S4 runs at around $5,000 which at the same price point as Power BI Premium P1. However, it gives you 100 GB of RAM and 20 cores, whereas P1 has only 25 GB and 8 cores.
2. Scaling out – A feature unique to AAS is ability to scale out to multiple query replicas. This is not an option with Power BI Premium, and it requires quite a bit of setup with SSAS. However, AAS makes scaling out easy by just changing a slider. And once you’re done, you can pause the instance, so it doesn’t incur cost!

Scaling out proved to be a useful feature lately when a client wanted to process massive queries in parallel. We cloned the model to AAS and wrote an ETL job to parallelize the query execution.

Note that the number of replicas depends on the data region and pricing level. For example, only East US 2 and West US support up to 7 query replicas up to S4. Another thing to watch for is that it’s not enough to just process the model on a scale-out farm. You’d need also to synchronize it across the query replicas. This could be done manually in the Azure Portal or automated, such by using the PowerShell script below that you can plug in a SQL Agent job. The script uses a regular AAD account which has admin rights to the server. You can also use a service principal, but I opted for a regular account because Microsoft removed the option for no expiration date for the client secret (the maximum lifetime of a client secret now is two years).

Import-Module Az.AnalysisServices
$password = "<account password>" | ConvertTo-SecureString -asPlainText -Force
$username = "craas@<domain>.com"
$aasendpoint = "asazure://aspaaseastus2.asazure.windows.net/crliveaas1"
$aasendpointmgmt = "asazure://aspaaseastus2.asazure.windows.net/crliveaas1:rw"
$TenantId = "<tenant id>"
$credential = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential($username,$password)
$defaultProfile = Connect-AzAccount -Credential $credential -Tenant $TenantId

Set-AzContext -Tenant $TenantId -DefaultProfile $defaultProfile
$server = Get-AzAnalysisServicesServer -ResourceGroupName "crliveaas_rg" -Name "crliveaas1" -DefaultProfile $defaultProfile
if ($server.State -eq "Paused")
{
    Resume-AzAnalysisServicesServer -Name "crliveaas1" -ResourceGroupName "crliveaas_rg"  
    #process database, first clear the data so processing doesn't go over memory limit
    Invoke-ProcessASDatabase -Server $aasendpointmgmt -DatabaseName "<databasename>" -RefreshType "ClearValues" -Credential $credential
    Invoke-ProcessASDatabase -Server $aasendpointmgmt -DatabaseName "<databasename>" -RefreshType "Full" -Credential $credential

    # sync database
   Add-AzAnalysisServicesAccount  -Credential:$credential -RolloutEnvironment:"aspaaseastus2.asazure.windows.net"
   Sync-AzAnalysisServicesInstance -Instance $aasendpointmgmt -Database "<databasename>" -PassThru
}