Processing Tabular from Exotic Clients

Processing Tabular models from SSMS or .NET client apps is pretty straightforward. For example, you can connect with SSMS and issue processing commands through the UI or via TMSL. You can also use custom apps with Tabular Object Model (TOM) and you can send XMLA commands directly if you have an app perhaps that’s already doing that.

For Azure AS, it’s generally a good idea to run the app sending the processing command in the same data center where the Azure AS server is. If your Tabular database gets data from an Azure database, such as Azure SQL Database, the database should also be located in the same data center for better processing throughput and to avoid data transfer fees between data centers.

But what if you want to issue a processing command from more exotic clients, such as Python? Or, incrementally process from SSIS? Start with creating a JSON processing script (assuming Analysis Services 2016 or higher, or Azure AS). For the following script, processes two tables and the latest partition of the third table with the Data Only option (loads only the data). All objects are processed in parallel and 10 is specified as a maximum degree of parallelism. Then, it processes the database with Calculate option to restore calculated columns, relationships, and hierarchies.

Next, assuming you’re processing Azure AS, use one of the Microsoft-provided libraries to authenticate against Azure AD. For example, use the Python library to authenticate and submit the JSON in a standard XMLA message.

{
  "sequence": {
  "maxParallelism": 10,
    "operations": [
      {
        "refresh": {
          "type": "dataOnly",
          "objects": [
            {
              "database": "DatabaseName",
              "table": "Table1"
            },
            {
              "database": "DatabaseName",
              "table": "Table2"
            },
            {
              "database": "DatabaseName",
              "table": "Table3",
              "partition": "Table3 Partition 2017"
            }
          ]
        }
      },
      {
        "refresh": {
          "type": "calculate",
          "objects": [
            {
              "database": "DatabaseName"
            }
          ]
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}