Entries Written By Bill
Model Development Performance Improvements for Tabular Models Using Compatibility Level 1200+
It wasn’t until just a few weeks ago, while performing a design assessment on a very large tabular model, that I was finally able to appreciate one of the most underrated improvements made in SSAS Tabular 2016. This particular client was on SSAS 2014 and had a very mature tabular model consisting of… 64 tables …
Using the Azure REST API to Pause All AS Instances in a Resource Group
Forgetting to shutdown your Azure environments and burning through a month’s worth of Azure MSDN credit if you’re lucky (and racking up a large credit card charge if you’re not) is a pretty common experience these days. Some might even call it a right-of-passage (like running a DELETE statement in PROD and forgetting the WHERE-clause). …
Monitoring Azure Analysis Services Instances via Azure Portal
At some point in the past couple weeks/months, the Azure Analysis Services team managed to expose a few more metrics to the Azure AS Monitoring / Metrics blade. Last I checked, there were only 2 metrics available… Memory and QPU… arguably two of the most important metrics to track as they indicate if/when it’s time to …
Azure Analysis Services: Choosing a Pricing Tier
April was a big month for the Azure Analysis Services community – as the product has finally been released for General Availability! Unfortunately, this also means bye bye to preview-pricing. Thankfully, there’s a new “tier” available to choose from when provisioning an Azure AS instance to help offset the price increase. Before this week, there …
Managing User Access to Azure Analysis Services Databases
In order to access a tabular model, users must either be a member of the Analysis Services instance administrators group or granted access via a database role. For on-premise SSAS instances, this meant adding the windows user account (e.g. Domain\User) to the SSAS database project via SSDT during development (or after deployment via SSMS). However, …
Connecting to Azure Analysis Services via Excel – Easy Mode
Power BI is certainly picking up speed, but the number 1 ad-hoc reporting client in Analysis Services environments continues to be Excel. Not much of a surprise really… Excel is a super popular tool across a wide-variety of users. Once you train someone how to use a pivot table, there’s no going back! In fact, …
Managing Your Azure AS Environment with PowerShell – Building Blocks
One of the major value propositions of Azure AS (and this is true for many cloud technologies) is flexibility – spinning up more resources when demand spikes and turn things off when they aren’t – so that you’re only paying for what you need. In order to take advantage of this flexibility, we need to …
How Much RAM Do I Need For My SSAS Tabular Server?
Much of my client work these days is focused on performance… making slow Analysis Services servers run faster. The good part about these types of engagements is that there’s usually (not always) a good amount of low-hanging fruit and I get to play the hero that swoops in to save the day. The bad part about these types of …
Managing Your Azure AS Environment with PowerShell – Getting Started
One of the major value propositions of Azure AS (and this is true for many cloud technologies) is flexibility – spinning up more resources when demand spikes and turn things off when they aren’t – so that you’re only paying for what you need. Consider your own Analysis Services environment. If it’s anything like the …
Analysis Services Tabular Is (Finally) NUMA-Aware!
Wow, right on the heals of Azure AS and just when you thought things couldn’t get any better for SSAS geeks of the world… Microsoft releases SP1 for SQL Server 2016… an voila, Tabular is now NUMA-Aware! Unfortunately, I don’t have any way to test this at the moment… but it certainly makes sense that …