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One pivot table contains an OLAP-style KPI, one ranks cities by sales, and one shows city sales as a % of their state. In essence, I used Excel as an end-user report writer and pushed them up to SharePoint so that others could interact with them. These are Excel spreadsheets with pivot tables and pivot charts that I created against a tabular model database, and then deployed to a SharePoint site. This article will spin through an example of creating a tabular model - and will talk about areas where the tabular model is indeed easier than OLAP, and even where it's either “not as easy,” or just “different.”īorrowing from the famous theme of “begin with the end in mind,” I want to draw your attention to Figures 26 through 30. Microsoft has responded with a new tabular model, which provides end users with many of the same benefits, but with (potentially) less development effort. Also, many found the OLAP programming language (MDX) to be difficult and non-intuitive. For many years, OLAP (and in the Microsoft world, Analysis Services) was the tool for creating databases.īut some viewed SSAS and OLAP as difficult. An analytic database natively supports “slice and dice” operations where JOIN statements aren't necessary. It is an analytic application, but not an analytic database. And oh yes, without needing to run to a developer.Īn application developer working with a transaction database might reply, “But wait, I provide many reports and charts and third-party tools to let users retrieve information.I've written many lines of code to simulate OLAP scenarios.isn't that an analytic database?” The answer is yes and no. I could literally cite different specifics, but all scenarios boil down to users being able to “get at” data, “by” different business entities. Examples include retrieving sales by store within market for both this quarter and last quarter to see trends, getting the top five sales people, comparing budget to actual by time period, etc. Tip 1: Getting Started: What Is a Tabular Model?Īt the end of the day, an analytic database (regardless of database vendor) helps business users to “get at” meaningful business metrics by different business dimensions/entities. Even if you don't intend to create analytic databases using traditional multidimensional OLAP, the article (especially the introduction and the first half of the article) provide some context that will be helpful in going through this article. I definitely recommend that you read the article ( ). In the March/April 2011 issue of CODE Magazine, I wrote an article on 13 tips for creating SSAS OLAP databases. Making the tabular model accessible in SharePoint.Building SSRS reports against the tabular model.Using DAX to build calculations based on relationships.Creating the project in SQL Server Data Tools.Setting up the data for a tabular model.Getting started: what is a tabular model?.In this article, I'll provide an overview for this new model and will walk through a basic example of creating an SSAS 2012 tabular model database. The new model brings the promise of simplified features and (in some cases) even better performance than traditional OLAP. In SQL Server Analysis Services 2012, Microsoft has created a second model (known as the tabular model) for creating analytic databases. However, some view the tools in SSAS/MDX as difficult to learn.
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These tools remain very powerful for creating analytic applications. SSAS includes the MDX programming language for retrieving data and writing custom expressions. For several years, database developers have created analytic (OLAP) databases using tools such as Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services.