Azure Analysis Services or Power BI – Which service fits you best?

Gabi Münster & Oliver Engels Positions GM: Teamlead Data Analytics at oh22data AG OE: CEO at oh22data AG Community Gabi Münster & Oliver Engels GM: MVP, Chapter Lead at PASS Germany OE: MVP, Regional Mentor, President PASS Germany, Chapter Lead at PASS Germany oh22data AG Passion /gabimuenster & /oengels Both: Crazy about Data Platform @SQLMissSunshine & @oengels gabi.munster & oengels 16:50

Agenda How do I find the right BI strategy for my company? CIO Well, we should start with a review of the near past…

Two years ago... 16:52 From: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2015/10/29/microsoft-business-intelligence-our-reporting-roadmap/

CIO Looks promising. And this is the strategy you propose? Well, you have to know a few things about Power BI in 2016: Power BI is a closed system  No access to the data for anything but Power BI (or Excel) Technical limitations, e.g. Dataset size Not enterprise ready  No integration in any kind of application lifecycle management So something needed to be changed...

Azure Analysis Server Services One year ago... Azure Analysis Server Services 16:55 Derived from: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2015/10/29/microsoft-business-intelligence-our-reporting-roadmap/

Seemless integration Frontends Standard Users AAS Web Designer + Enterprise Migration Key User Self Service BI Enterprise BI 17:05 (showing Portal, Web Designer + Import + BISM Normalizer)

Demo Seemless integration

Makes sense. Analysis services is known to a lot of people from on-premise. And with the integration strategy this looks good. So this is the strategy you propose? CIO Well, let‘s have a look at the changes of the last twelve months to Analysis Services and Power BI...

BI developer perspective Which areas to look at? BI developer perspective Which new features do we have? BI administrator perspective What changed regarding scalability, maintainability, monitoring? Developer perspective What about integration with business applications?

BI developer perspective Azure Analysis Services New Memory Options (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2018/06/08/new-memory-options-for-analysis-services/ ) Power BI Aggregations Bookmarks Composite Models Conditional formatting Custom Connectors Dataflows Drill-through Incremental Refresh Many to many relationships Q&A SSRS Reports ...

CIO I already played around a bit with Power BI. Let me show you... 17:15

Demo Composite models

BI administrator perspective Azure Analysis Services Scalability Whitepaper (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2018/08/08/whitepaper-on-modeling-for-as-tabular-scalability/ ) Power BI Admin APIs Incremental Refresh Apps Monitoring

Developer perspective Azure Analysis Services Rest API for asynchronous refresh (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2017/12/20/asynchronous-refresh-with-the-rest-api-for-azure-analysis-services/ ) NuGet packages for AMO and ADOMD (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2018/08/08/whitepaper-on-modeling-for-as-tabular-scalability/ ) Power BI Power BI Embedded Enable apps to programmatically use slicers Error Event logging Export to PowerPoint and PDF Get data APIs Model Parameters API Phased embedding XMLA endpoints opened 17:20

XMLA endpoints opened? CIO What does this mean? It means Power BI will be opened up. The „hidden“ model will be accessible like a Azure Analysis Services model: You can use Tabular Object Model / Tabular Model Scripting Language You can connect with other Frontend tools You can integrate the model into application life cycle management

In August we thought: Now we think: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/october18/intelligence-platform/planned-features 17:30 (show Connection and deployment): Wir könnten hier auch die Connection zu Power BI Desktop zeigen But I can show you how to interact with Azure Analysis Services instead.

Demo XMLA connectivity

What will happen to Analysis Services? Analysis Services has been in place for about 20 years and is still an important product. Also Azure Analysis Services proved to be a fast growing service. So Analysis Services will not be removed and we expect it to be supported for quite a long time. But new developments will happen to Power BI first and not all developments will be shipped for Analysis Services as well. Power BI will become a superset to Analysis Services. But if Power BI will cover all this and even has more modeling functionality what will happen to Analysis Services? Will it be deprecated? CIO

Which picture do we see now? Azure Analysis Server Services Azure Analysis Services

Is Power BI the only choice left? So finally you would say that we should use Power BI as our modelling tool? CIO Well, that wouldn‘t be a bad choice. But actually, it still depends. Let‘s recap the current and future state of features and services. 17:32

Features and services today / roadmap PBI Pro PBI Premium AAS Scalability - / - X / X XX / XX Usage based cost management App lifecycle management - / ? - / X Availability of new features This doesn‘t look that bad for SSAS... True. And that is why we still need to figure out some facts before we can take a decision

Which questions should you raise? Is this a fresh start or a migration of available structures (e.g. On-premise)? How is the timeline? How flexibly can I react to changes in functionality and timelines? How important is it to get the newest features as quick as possible? How is my usage behaviour regarding: The timely distribution of report consumption? The ratio of consuming users to Pro users? The ratio of Power BI users to users of other visualization tools? 17:37

How to make a choice? Where do we start? Completely fresh Existing landscape Which reporting tools do we plan for? Only Power BI Power BI and others Other tools How much do we use reporting? 24/7 8/5 Azure Analysis Services How is our Power BI user structure? Mostly consumers Mostly editors 17:40

Conclusion At the current point in time AAS has some advantages regarding Enterprise readiness, but Power BI is catching up. Regarding new features and expectations Power BI looks more promising. Also existing gaps in Power BI regarding support for third party visualization tools are closed. AAS keeps the advantage of scalability and cost efficiency at a non permanent usage scenario. So usage and cost estimations are necessary. From our perspective business scenarios for both services exist and will exist in future. Even parallel usage might make sense, especially taking into consideration the possibility of using the same toolset. But a clear direction towards Power BI Premium can be deduced.

Don‘t miss the other sessions... There are a lot of sessions delivering valuable content for Power BI and Tabular. This is just a small special MS extract, look for more  Microsoft Power BI: The Future for Modern and Enterprise BI (Thursday, 3:15 pm, 6B, Arun Ulagaratchagan, Amir Netz) Microsoft Power BI: Distributing Insights and Governing Self-Service Analytics with the Microsoft Power BI Service (Thursday, 4:45 pm, TCC Tahoma 4, Adam Saxton, Lukasz Pawlowski) Building Enterprise-Grade BI Models with Microsoft Power BI (Friday, 9:30 am, TCC Skagit 4, Christian Wade, Josh Caplan) BI Power Hour (Friday, 11:00 am, 3AB, a crazy bunch of people) Modern Enterprise Reporting with Power BI Report Server & the Power BI Service (Friday, 2:00 pm, 2AB, Chris Finlan) 17:45

Thank you