At long last, the SSAS 2012 Tabular book that Marco Russo, Alberto Ferrari and I have been working hard on for the last few months is now available for pre-order!
You can get it from Amazon UK, Amazon US, oreilly.com and all good bookstores…
New SSAS 2012 Tabular book available for pre-order
Awesome! Well done! By the way, what it the “thing” on the cover??
You know what, I was wondering the same thing…
Awesome! Well done! By the way, what is this “thing” on the cover??
The ‘thing’ on the cover? I would think it is a torque wrench.
Well Done! Can’t wait to get my hands on it. But why no Kindle version??? I don’t buy physical books anymore
Me neither. This looks like something I really want to read. What are the chances of a kindle version?
Hey Chris,
I’m a frequent follower and fan of your blog, and I just read the ‘Choosing the Right Model for Your Project’ section at the beginning of the book (which I just got a couple days ago).
I’m currently in the unique position where I am starting an OLAP implementation with an organization that does not currently have one. My experience is in SSAS MD. So… I am truly at that fork in the road.
Naturally the easier route for me is to choose MD because that is what I’m more familiar with — but, for the past year (at least), I have been reading the same writing on the wall as everyone else… this being that MS is spending the majority of it’s OLAP energy on tabular, not MD. I of course don’t want to paint anyone into a corner by choosing the wrong route.
I was hoping you could possibly share your thoughts on the MD vs. Tabular question given some details about the project. Here is what I know right now after extracting a limited amount of data from the primary OLTP, transforming, and building a SSAS MD prototype.
General stuff:
Priority one is to offload the reporting strain that existing operational (SSRS reports) are putting on the OLTP source. The data analysis/exploration side of the sprectrum will be an on-going education process.
I am leading the charge, and as mentioned, my experience is in MD
I am the only one here with SSAS expertise, but the organization has several SQL pros that can/will come up to speed quickly.
I have some experience with PowerPivot, so I have had a some exposure to tabular.
I don’t get the sense that the organization has many (if any) Excel power users (candidate users that would ramp up quickly with DAX). In fact, just general pivot table slicing/dicing will be challenging initially…
Specific Req’s/Features:
I do have ragged hierarchies with fact data joining at all levels (eg: Insurance angencies that have agents and other angencies, that have their own agents under them…)
I do have many to many relationships (eg: Insurance data with ‘Policies In Force’ at any give time, so in the prototype I’ve implemented a temporal snapshot fact table…)
I have implemented my one date dimension as several role playing dimensions (for different date types)
I have shown drill-through in a demo, and folks really liked it…
That’s what I know right now…I’d appreciate any insight.
Thanks so much,
Ryan
Hmm, it sounds like you’ve got a tough choice. The ragged hierarchies won’t be properly ragged in Tabular, and the many-to-many relationships will complicate the code in all your measures, but there don’t seem to be any real deal-breakers as far as Tabular goes; so long as licensing isn’t an issue, I’d say you should go ahead and build a Tabular prototype to compare with your Multidimensional prototype. Only then are you going to be able to get a feel for all the pros/cons of each model for your project.
Thanks Chris!