SSAS Tabular and Excel PowerPivot

I don’t know why it took so long before making the connection between PowerPivot models and SSAS Tabular models, but in the last couple of days I came across several blogs and videos tying the two together. With that in mind, I took the plunge into PowerPivot and built a quick model off of some SQL queries to test out a concept.

I started with the basics of mocking up a fact table. I stripped out decorator text, “renamed” a couple of columns in the query, filtered the data so I wouldn’t pull back a crazy amount into my local workstation, verified the counts and look of the data in a SQL query, and added that. Excel quickly loaded 1.2M rows and didn’t blink.

After that, I knew I needed a couple of Dimension-like tables. I wrote queries for those in a similar fashion and added the data again. Each addition went smoothly. I was able to add the proper relationships quickly to tie everything together.

To finalize the model, I created a couple of hierarchies to make querying easier. After messing around with these several times in SSAS Multi-Dimensional, I was shocked at how easy it was to create a hierarchy for dates and even certain domain-specific entries in our data: Right-click, create new hierarchy, drag and drop columns. Done.

After the model was finished, I dropped the relevant fact data into a Pivot Table and could easily analyze the data in all sorts of interesting ways. I worked around this with OLAP for quite some time to come up with a similar concept. With PowerPivot, I wrote a couple of queries, linked the tables, and had something workable within an hour. As an added benefit, I know I can scale that up to an SSAS server without too much trouble and have a similar experience.

Hat tip to the folks @ www.powerpivotpro.com and www.sqlbi.com for the many articles and pointers to get me started and over that initial hump.