BISM Normalizer

I’ve just come across a new, free utility for SSAS 2012 Tabular called BISM Normalizer:

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/5be8704f-3412-4048-bfb9-01a78f475c64

Basically it’s a tool that allows you to compare the metadata of two Tabular models and optionally copy parts of one model over to another. It’s very interesting because it addresses what I think is one of the big challenges encountered when bridging the gap between self-service and corporate BI: how can you take a bunch of independently-produced PowerPivot models and merge them into a single, coherent, Analysis Services Tabular model? Ultimately this is a problem that Microsoft is going to have to deal with itself in future versions of SSAS, along with the related problem of how parts of a ‘corporate’ Tabular model can be reused inside PowerPivot models (I’d like some form of object inheritance or ‘linked tables’, rather than have to copy data and rebuild metadata from scratch as we have to today).