What does this mean for the cost of Azure Analysis Services? Basically, if you’re taking advantage of these features you won’t pay one of the monthly prices quoted on the pricing page linked to at the top of this post. Instead you may do things like:
- Scale up for one hour every day when you need to process your SSAS database, just to get the extra memory and QPUs needed, then scale down when processing has finished
- Scale out only on certain days, or certain times of day, to handle increased numbers of users
- Pause your instance when you are sure that no-one needs to run queries
How do you then calculate the likely cost? For my Azure Analysis Services precon at SQLBits a few months ago I built an Excel workbook that shows how to go about this.
There are some good questions in the comments section, so check those out as well.