Entries Written By Bill
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 …
Processing an Azure AS Database
This post contains a list of various methods that can be used to process (i.e. load data into) an Azure AS tabular model. As you will see – not much has changed from the regular on-premise version (which is a very good thing as it softens the learning curve). Note: In these examples, I’m using …
Interrogating the Azure AS Configuration Files via PowerShell
When brought in the perform a health check or performance optimization, one of the first steps in the process (after getting the perfmon and xevent traces running) is to document review the environment. In addition to the basics (i.e. CPU cores, GB of memory, clock speeds, etc) one item I’m really interested in is the …
On-Premise Data Gateway: Capturing SSAS Query Activity By User
When I’m managing an Analysis Services environment, I’m not just interested in the performance of the workload… yeah that’s important, but I’m also interested in the users who are generating that workload… especially the top users… and here’s why: These top users are your biggest customers. They’ve already bought-in to the product/solution and you should …
Navigating Complex Tabular Models Quickly – Developer Edition
As a developer, working with large/complex tabular models – “large” in terms of the number of tables, columns, and/or measures (not data size) – can be frustrating and borderline soul-crushing. Allow me to paint a picture for you… You’ve just inherited a large tabular model along with a large backlog of “adjustments/tweaks”… rename these columns, adjust …
I’ll Make Them an Offer They Can’t Refuse
Over the past few weeks I’ve been flexing my network to try and get on an Azure DW project…and so far I’ve come up empty handed. Now granted, I could definitely be wrong about this… but I *thought* my offer was overly generous and guaranteed to land me on an Azure DW project… “I will work …