Self-Service Business Intelligence with Microsoft PowerPivot Andrew J. Brust

Who Am I? Co-chair VSLive! and my 15 th year as a speaker Member, Microsoft BI Partner Advisory Council Microsoft Regional Director, MVP Co-moderator, NYC.NET Developers Group – “Redmond Review” columnist for Visual Studio Magazine and Redmond Developer News Chief, New Technology –Microsoft Gold Certified Partner –BI, Integration, Portals, Custom.NET development brustblog.com,

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Why Self-Service BI? “Spreadmarts” exist, no matter what: –Power users like Excel, but… –No true db or OLAP engine – as sharing mechanism, Excel as only client –Often, no refresh –No discoverability by IT People do need BI, but: –They don’t have the vocabulary or the MD concepts –They don’t want to deal with formal design –They do know Excel and how to analyze data within it They need RBID (rabid?) – Rapid BI Development, and Excel gives it to them

Enter PowerPivot Excel + Analysis Services + SharePoint Enables the scenario but mitigates the technological deficits: –Stay in Excel –Use Analysis Services (AS) as a hidden engine –Share via SharePoint, accessible by all AS clients –Formal data refresh on server –Allow IT to monitor –Provide path to more rigorous implementations

Architecture Column-Oriented, In-Memory BI (IMBI) –Support extra-large data sets Desktop version of AS with Excel add-in –Add-in and Excel are only UIs Special SharePoint-integrated version of AS –Load-balanced –Instances spun up on demand Supported by MSOLAP.4 (i.e. 2008) OLE DB provider –PowerPivot installs extensions to provider to enable this

The Simple View

The Detailed View

Column-Oriented Stores Imagine, instead of: You have: Perf: values you wish to aggregate are adjacent Efficiency: great compression from identical or nearly- identical values in proximity Fast aggregation and high compression means huge volumes of data can be stored and processed, in RAM Employee IDAgeIncome Employee ID123 Age Income

Client Excel 2010 –PivotTables, PivotCharts, Slicers (new) PowerPivot add-in/client –Provides in-memory, column-oriented desktop version of Analysis Services, accessible only by Excel –Can import data from a number of heterogeneous data sources –Actually builds an AS cube in the background –Supports special calculated columns –Embeds its data in the.xlsx workbook

The Ribbons Excel 2010: PowerPivot Client:

Data Import Relational databases –SQL Server (including SQL Azure!), Access –Oracle, DB2, Sybase, Informix –Teradata –“Others” (OLE DB, including OLE DB prvdr for ODBC) Atom feeds and R2 Reporting Services –And any ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) feed Filter, preview, friendly names Excel –Paste from clipboard, linked tables

DEMO PowerPivot Client Data Modeling

Reports and Feeds Service Document –External, inline Individual ATOM Feeds File spec or http(s):// URI Automating from RS R2 viewer

DEMO Data Feed and Report Data Imports

Relationships Between tables from same data source: often automatic Between tables from heterogeneous data sources: always manual No composite keys Why relationships are important

Calculated Columns and DAX Formula-based columns may be created Formula syntax is called DAX (Data Analysis eXpressions). –Not to be confused with MDX or DMX. Or DACs. DAX expressions are similar to Excel formulas –Work with tables and columns; similar to, but distinct from, worksheets and their columns (and rows) =FUNC('table name'[column name]) =FUNCX('table name', ) FILTER(Resellers,[ProductLine] = "Mountain") RELATED(Products[EnglishProductName]) DAX expressions can be heavily nested

DEMO Relationships and Calculated Columns

Client Query Push data back to Excel: creating PowerPivot PivotTables and PivotCharts Using slicers Calculated measures

DEMO Querying PowerPivot Data in Excel

Server Publish to Excel Services –Office Synchronization Center Viewing and interacting Data Refresh Treating as cube –URL to.xlsx as server name Db name is GUID-based; best to discover it –Use Excel, Reporting Services as clients –Examine in SSMS, BIDS IMBI vs. MOLAP/ROLAP/HOLAP

DEMO PowerPivot on the Server

Monitoring and Conventional BI IT dashboard Why “refactor” a popular project? –Better dimensional design: hierarchies, parent-child dimensions –Calculated measures in MDX –Aggregation design, proactive caching –No superfluous measure groups and dims

Market Analysis IMBI, columnar models respond to competition –Self-Service, desktop: QlikView –Columnar: Sybase IQ, Vertica (and QlikView again) –In-memory: MicroStrategy (and QlikView again) Catering to Excel power users and “quants” is the perfect sweet spot. –Excel is where everyone tries to be –DAX has a great Excel affinity –BI for the discriminating non-specialist Tying to SharePoint leverages emerging franchise –Other vendors do it, but only MS can do it so well

Timeline CTP3 is here, and public SQL 2008 R2, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010 –Due “first half” o CY 2010 –64-bit required on server

Resources Web Sites: – – Blogs – (team) – (Rob Collie) – (Denny Lee and Dave Wickert) – (Dave Wickert) Documentation: –Server: –DAX reference: Social networks: – – Hands-on-Lab (developed by 26NY for MS)

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