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…
Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, Analysis Services, DAX, M, MDX, Power Query, Power Pivot and Excel
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…
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!