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Category: Analysis Services

Tabular Model Calculation Groups and Compatibility Level

Published 2023-11-16 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt sorts out a problem:

While I was writing another data recipe, I ran into an issue. For some reason, the “Create Calculation Group” was not visible / enabled in Tabular Editor.

I tried to create a Calculation Group by right-clicking on the Table Folder –> Create but the option wasn’t available.

I tried an alternative way: going to the Model Section in the Tabular Editor toolbar. But unfortunately, the option to create a new Calculation Group was disabled.

Read on to see how Olivier solved this problem.

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SortByColumn Set to Invalid Column ID in SSAS Tabular

Published 2023-10-09 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt troubleshoots an error:

After making these changes, we pushed our changes into Azure DevOps and our deployment pipeline started to deploy the changes to the requested environment.

While the deployment process was executing, it stopped and failed promptly. We ran into an issue: “SortByColumn property set to an invalid column ID”

Read on to see the ultimate cause of and solution to the problem.

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Finding SSAS Tabular Dimensions in Excel

Published 2023-09-22 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt has lost a few dimensions in the couch cushions:

A colleague reached out last week while connecting to one of our SQL Server Analysis Services models in Excel. He couldn’t find the expected Attribute folders in the model. He was looking for the following dimensions:

Of particular interest was that this colleague could not see them but Olivier could. The answer ends up being a bit surprising.

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Restoring SSAS Cubes to SQL Server 2022 CU5

Published 2023-08-21 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria runs into a problem:

I have a client who was upgrading some servers from pre-2022 versions of SQL Server to SQL Server 2022 CU7. They had some multidimensional SSAS cubes that were to go on the new server. But they ran into an issue after the upgrade. After restoring a backup of an SSAS database to the new server they found that they could no longer modify the data source using SSMS.

Read on to see what the problem was, as well as how to fix it.

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WaitTime in Power BI

Published 2023-05-03 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb explains what a new metric means:

What does WaitTime represent? Here’s the technical explanation: it’s the wait time on the query thread pool in the Analysis Services engine before the query starts to run. But what does this mean for you as someone trying to tune DAX queries in Power BI?

Chris provides an examplation of exactly that. This tracking of noisy neighbors is interesting, as it would provide insight if you’re noticing variance in dataset refresh times.

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Fixing VertiPaq Analyzer Dictionary Size Errors

Published 2022-12-16 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo troubleshoots an issue:

There are cases where the dictionary size reported by VertiPaq Analyzer (used by DAX Studio, Bravo for Power BI, and Tabular Editor 3) does not correspond to the actual memory required by the dictionary. However, the number reported is technically correct because it represents the memory currently allocated for the dictionary. The issue is that – after a refresh – this memory amount is larger than the actual memory required for hash-encoded columns.

Read on to learn what the consequences are and how you can resolve this in Power BI Desktop as well as in Analysis Services.

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Thoughts on a Migration: Azure Analysis Services to Power BI Premium

Published 2022-12-06 by Kevin Feasel

Dan English shares some thoughts:

Over the past month couple of months I got the opportunity to test out the new migration experience that was just made available for Public Preview this past month during the PASS Data Community Summit and announced on the Power BI blog here Accelerate your migration experience from Azure Analysis Services to Power BI Premium with the automated migration tool. The blog post also shows a very quick animated gif walkthrough of the process and there is a thirteen minute video from the MS Build conference earlier this year where this was first demoed that you can check out here as well The Future of Enterprise Semantic Models.

Click through for a detailed analysis.

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What’s New in SSAS 2022

Published 2022-12-06 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb goes digging:

There was a time when a new release of SQL Server – and therefore a new release of SQL Server Analysis Services – was the most exciting thing in the world for me. New functionality! New things to blog about! Not so now that my focus, and Microsoft’s, is on Power BI and we get cool new functionality there every month. All the same there are still a lot of people running SSAS on-premises and SQL Server 2022 has just been released, so what’s new and is it worth upgrading?

Read on for Chris’s thoughts. MDX even makes an appearance.

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Migrating Azure Analysis Services to Power BI Premium

Published 2022-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers dumps AAS:

I thought it would be a good idea to walk through the steps when looking to migrate AAS to PBI.

In the past when I had to do this for clients it was a lot of manual steps and a lot of small things to get just right. This process is now seamless and awesome!

Reviewing Gilbert’s step-by-step process, yeah, this is easy, though watch out for the pitfalls Gilbert found.

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Tracking Power BI Desktop Activity in SQL Server

Published 2022-10-06 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb looks in on things:

Something I do all the time when performance tuning Power BI is use SQL Server Profiler to monitor query and refresh activity. There’s a handy external tool that lets you open up Profiler with a connection to Power BI Desktop; if you’re using Power BI Premium you can also connect Profiler up to a published dataset using the XMLA Endpoint. Profiler is a bit old-school though and likely to lead to snarky comments from SQL Server DBAs (it’s not deprecated for Analysis Services though!) who’ll say you should be using Extended Events (aka xEvents) instead. And guess what – did you know you can use Analysis Services xEvents to monitor activity in Power BI Desktop?

It’s the power of Extended Events.

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