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Category: Analysis Services

Modeling Semi-Additive Measures

Published 2019-09-16 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Poco shows a couple techniques for modeling semi-additive measures in Analysis Services and Power BI:

As mentioned earlier, the most commonly encountered approach is Option 2, the snapshot fact table. The main drawback of this approach is that the fact table’s size will grow extremely fast. For example, if you want to calculate the headcount in a company with 10,000 employees on average, and you want 5 years of historical data, you will add 10,000 rows per day to your fact table – that gives you (10,000 * 365 * 5 =) 18,250,000 rows after 5 years.  

If you used the first approach, Option 1, the fact table would be (10,000 * 5 =) 50,000 rows after 5 years, assuming your employees change position or quit the company once a year, on average. 

The snapshot fact table (Option 2) is (18,250,000 / 50,000 =) 365 times bigger. On the bright side, as the data is very repetitive, you might get a very good compression ratio on these tables.  

Check it out. Semi-additive measures are not as common as additive measures, but you’re liable to have a couple of them in your data model.

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AutoSetDefaultInitialCatalog in Analysis Services

Published 2019-09-12 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb goes on a journey to understand what the AutoSetDefaultInitialCatalog property in Analysis Services does:

In Shabnam Watson’s recent blog post on a bug she found when trying to create a Live connection from Power BI to Analysis Services she mentioned that the AutoSetDefaultInitialCatalog server property could be used to solve her problem. This piqued my interested because I’d seen this property but had no idea what it did exactly or why it was there. Luckily, now I work for Microsoft, it’s even easier for me to find out about things like this from the dev team and Akshai Mirchandani was able to help.

First of all, what does it do? The documentation on this property has just been added here, and this is what it says:

Chris has connections, and we get to benefit from that.

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Power BI Desktop to SSAS Error with No Models

Published 2019-09-04 by Kevin Feasel

Shabnam Watson takes us through various cases where you might hit an error connecting your Power BI Desktop installation to an SSAS server:

I recently ran into an error while connecting live from Power BI Desktop to a SSAS server. Everything was on-premises.There was no cloud component involved. I had full admin rights to the SSAS server and could see all databases and models from SSMS and other tools but was getting this error from PBI Desktop.

The Server you’re trying to connect to doesn’t have any models or you don’t have permissions to access them.

If I explicitly specified the name of the database I wanted to connect to, then it would connect and show me the database contents but if I did not specify the database name, I would get this error. The question is why?

Read on for several possible answers.

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Connecting to Redshift from Azure Analysis Services

Published 2019-08-23 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers shows how we can connect to Amazon Redshift from Azure Analysis Services:

I am busy working with a customer and had a challenge when using Azure Analysis Services to connect to Amazon Redshift via an ODBC connection.

The first issue that I encountered was the following error: OLE DB or ODBC error: [Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] The specified DSN contains an architecture mismatch between the Driver and Application; AWS PROD. This lead me to a few websites and the one that got me to my solution was Tabular: Error while using ODBC data source for Importing Data

Below are the steps on how I installed, configured and got the connection and refresh working.

Read on for those steps.

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Calculated Columns and Memory Usage in Analysis Services

Published 2019-08-21 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev troubleshoots a customer issue:

Scenario: A client reports a memory spike during processing. They have a Tabular semantic model deployed to Azure Analysis Services. They fully process the model daily. The model normally takes less than 50 GB RAM but during processing, it spikes five times and Azure Analysis Services terminates the processing task complaining that it “reached the maximum allowable memory in our pricing tier”. Normally, fully processing the model should take about twice the memory but five times?

Teo gives us the explanation for this problem as well as a recommendation on how to fix it.

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Naive Bayes Predictions with Analysis Services

Published 2019-08-05 by Kevin Feasel

Dinesh Asanka shows how you can use the Naive Bayes algorithm in an Analysis Services data mining project:

Microsoft Naive Bayes is a classification supervised learning. This data set can be bi-class which means it has only two classes. Whether the patient is suffering from dengue or not or whether your customers are bike buyers or not, are an example of the bi-class data set. There can be multi-class data set as well.

Let us take the example which we discussed in the previous article, AdventureWorks bike buyer example. In this example, we will use vTargetMail database view in the AdventureWorksDW database.

During the data mining algorithm wizard, the Microsoft Naive Bayes algorithm should be selected as shown in the below image.

Of mild interest is that it’s a two-class classifier here, but it’s a multi-class classifier in the (much) later ML.NET.

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Diagnosing Analysis Services with SSASDiag

Published 2019-07-22 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb discusses SSASDiag:

There are a lot of great community-developed tools out there for Analysis Services developers to use (BI Developer Extensions, DAX Studio, Tabular Editor, Analysis Services Query Analyzer to name a few) and they have saved me vast amounts of time and effort over the years. When I joined Microsoft last month I came across one which I had never seen before but which is nevertheless quite mature and feature-rich: the SSAS Diagnostics Tool or SSASDiag for short. It’s available on GitHub here:
https://github.com/ssasdiag/SSASDiag

Read on for Chris’s initial thoughts and check out the tool.

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Moving a Power BI Data Model to Tabular

Published 2019-05-30 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant provides some tips on migrating from a Power BI data model to an Analysis Services Tabular model:

Unless you are upgrading to analysis services on SQL Server 2019, chances are you are going to have to review your DAX code and make some modifications as DAX on the other versions of SQL Server are not the same as Power BI. I was upgrading to AS on SQL Server 2016, there were some commands that I had to manual edit out of the JSON file. If you have any new DAX commands, take them out of your Power BI Model which means you will not have to manually edit the JSON file to remove them when the new commands are flagged as errors. Make sure your Power BI Model does not include commands such as SELECTEDVALUE, GENERATESERIES as well as all of the automatically generated date hierarchies. After your Power BI desktop file is clean, leave it running as you are going to need to have it running for the next step.

Click through for more details.

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Auditing Azure Analysis Services

Published 2019-05-30 by Kevin Feasel

Kasper de Jonge shows how you can audit an Azure Analysis Services cube:

So the question was: how can I see who connected to my AS Azure database and what queries where send? Initially I thought of ways I used to do this in the on premises world. Capture profiler traces or XEvents by writing code and then store it somewhere for processing. It looks like was not alone in these, even the AS team itself had ways to capture XEvents and store them: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/using-xevents-with-azure-analysis-services/

But it turns out it is much more smooth, simple and elegant by leveraging Azure’s own products. In this case we will be using Azure Log Analytics. It already documented in the official documentation here.

Click through for a demo.

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