Introducing SSAS Tabular

SSAS Multidimensional, as you have seen in the previous chapter, is a very powerful modeling tool that provides all the features of OLAP cubes. However, working with multidimensional requires a learning curve; you will need to read a book or some articles, or watch online videos to learn how to work with SSAS Multidimensional.

On the other hand, nowadays, the In-Memory engine is a new technology that provides a very fast response to a client's queries. As you learned from the previous chapter, SSAS Multidimensional loads data into a disk-based storage as long as it is much faster than a database engine, but it will be much faster if it is loaded into memory.

Self-Service BI is another reason why SSAS Tabular comes to help. Earlier, Microsoft provided a tabular solution named Excel PowerPivot. Excel PowerPivot is a tabular modeling technology added in Excel, which helps power users to create models based on their requirements, load data into the In-Memory engine, and solve their business needs easily without requiring a big BI solution.

The SSAS Tabular technology was created as a response to these main reasons: the In-Memory engine, less development time, and the ability to work as a corporate BI solution that can import PowerPivot models. There are other reasons but the main rationales of this technology are those that have just been mentioned. The next diagram shows the comparison of the position of Microsoft analytics solutions with each other.

PowerPivot is the first released tabular modeling technology; it is very powerful and very good for power users because they can connect to data sources and create a model based on their business requirements. PowerPivot could be enhanced for Team BI when it comes with SharePoint. SharePoint can be host for the PowerPivot model. Finally, SSAS Tabular brings the features of corporate BI and tabular together to fill this gap. As a corporate BI, the SSAS Tabular model is scalable and can be deployed to the SSAS Server (more details will be given later in this chapter). Take a look at the following diagram that shows the comparison of SSAS Tabular and Multidimension:

The SSAS Tabular technology that was released with SQL Server 2012 comes with Microsoft's In-Memory engine called xVelocity. xVelocity is a column store engine and provides high performance, In-Memory caching, highly parallel data scanning, and compression.

SSAS Tabular and SSAS Multidimensional cannot reside in a single instance; in other words, a single instance of Analysis Services can be tabular or multidimensional, not both. Therefore, you would need to install two instances of Analysis Services or use two different machines if you want to have both tabular and multidimensional side by side.