SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence Module 9: PowerPivot

Overview PowerPivot For Excel PowerPivot For SharePoint

Lesson: PowerPivot For Excel PowerPivot Introduction PowerPivot and Excel PowerPivot Features PowerPivot Functions VertiPaq Engine Where are my rows? SQL Azure CodePlex Projects PowerPivot versus SSAS

PowerPivot Introduction Microsoft's PowerPivot for Excel 2010 is a data analysis tool for business users that delivers unmatched computational power directly within Excel 2010 Why Excel?  Excel is an easy and known tool to all business users Why PowerPivot?  Creating and Building Cubes with Analysis Services is complex and over kill for many organizations NOTE: PowerPivot creation and modification works in Excel 2010 only!  Requires Enterprise SKU of SharePoint

PowerPivot & Excel PowerPivot extends Excel  Excel is the most popular tool for business users  Allows users to manage data and make decisions (If IT can’t provide the tools, Excel is used)  There are both 32bit and 64bit versions, must match your installed Office 2010 version PowerPivot improves Excel and End users by  Increasing efficiencies  Powerful toolset of functions

Power Pivot Features Data Analysis Expressions (DAX)  Express BI logic based on Excel formula syntax with added functionality  Calculated Columns (cleanse and extend)  PivotTable Measures (advanced analysis) Tools for working with Data Sources  Table Import Wizard (html tables, other tabular data)  Join disparate data into composite data sources (local text file with remote database, two separate data warehouses)  Data Feeds (SharePoint 2010 REST, ATOM)  You can also copy and paste into the current in-memory data! Data/Column-based compression  Load large data sets into memory and process in seconds Bring Slicing and Dicing to Excel  Use to only exist in tools like Analysis Services (OLAP) when using large datasets

PowerPivot DAX Functions PowerPivot has many different categories of functions:  Date and Time (EOMonth, Weekday)  Filter and Value (Calculate, All)  Logical (true, false)  Math and Trig  Statistical (CountRows, SumX)  Text  Time Intelligence (StartOfMonth, EndOfMonth)  Information (IsError)

VertiPaq Engine Wait, you can load “millions” of rows in Excel? What?  Yep, using the VertiPaq engine, you can download and compress millions of rows of data into Excel What is VertiPaq?  An SSAS implementation AMO and ADOMD.NET are used to interface with VertiPaq  Means that traditional MDX and XMLA can be used to query the multidimensional data generated Everything runs in-proc to Excel (best performance on 64bit client)  If one crashes, all crashes  Limited to the memory of the machine Most data you are crunching should have been already pre- processed at some level  Alleviate some of the work from the client machine

Where are my rows? When you pull down 100’s of millions of rows where does the data go?  Answer: Memory In-Memory BI (IMBI) is a database storage technique used by PowerPivot  Common pattern used in large scale transaction systems  Allows for no-disk I/O, quick data scans and compression of data  Column striping versus Row striping When saving the data, it goes into the workbook (zip file)  \customXml\item1.data  For caching purposes, some resides in the %temp%\VertiPaq_ folder before save Note: SharePoint has a 2GB File limit, variable compression ratio means what runs in PowerPivot might not save in SharePoint!  Depending on your dataset, your compression will vary (15x), the more data, the better the compression

SQL Azure Support One of the data sources supported with PowerPivot is SQL Azure SQL Azure is a database server in the cloud  Just a simple SQL Server hosted somewhere else that will have (at some point) guaranteed uptime and performance features As of today, the following is not supported in the Cloud  Analysis Services  Reporting Services  Replication  Service Broker

Avoiding PowerPivot PowerPitfalls PowerPivot is no doubt easy and powerful, however, be sure to Plan!  Training your PowerPivot users DAX, Best Practices (single workbook vs multiple)  Cooperation between business units and IT Plan for power user access to data (data feeds) and support  Planning your PowerPivot for SharePoint deployment(s) Dept, Enterprise  PowerPivot requires Office 2010 You have to plan another rollout of Office  You still need highly experienced BI Consultants!

PowerPivot Resources Several helpful resources for PowerPivot exist  PowerPivotpro.com  PowerPivotTwins.com CodePlex has a PowerPivot Sample Data project   Data rich access databases that you can “play” with

Lesson: PowerPivot For SharePoint Traditional Excel Issues Why Excel And SharePoint? Features Management

Traditional Excel Problems ing the data  Leaves the company, can cause Inbox problems (160MB reports) Ensuring correct versions are published to recipients Keeping the report up to date (changing data and requirements) Report author is out for a week the report is due, what happens?

Why Excel and SharePoint? Share and Collaborate  Put in document library, not in Publish your Excel reports to SharePoint  In place, scheduled data refreshes Manage security with SharePoint  If they don’t have at least view permission, they will never know it exists!

PowerPivot, Excel and SharePoint, Oh My! Combining all three technologies presents giant leap forward in the world of Business Intelligence  SharePoint provides the Security and Management  Excel provides the simple and easy user interface  PowerPivot provides the data analytics engine

PowerPivot for SharePoint Features Tight integration with SharePoint through Solutions and Features  PowerPivot Gallery – Rich preview features  View Only Permissions allow interaction without modification  Set of custom actions added to Central Administration for management Unattended Data Refresh  PowerPivot data sources can be refreshed based on your custom schedule Highly informative charts and reports provide information on usage  Utilize built in reports to track usage  Discover mission-critical applications

PowerPivot for SharePoint Installation Install is done through the SQL Server 2008 R2 installer package  Installer can create a new SharePoint Farm or add support for an existing Farm  Installation is MUCH simpler using the SQL Installer to create a NEW farm PP4S requires a VertiPaq Analysis Services database instance  If you have installed the full Analysis Services you will need to create another instance that is in VertiPaq mode  ASOMD.NET xxxx

PowerPivot for SharePoint Components Components include:  SharePoint Service  SharePoint Service Application  Solutions and Features Dashboards, web parts, content types and list templates (PowerPivot Gallery and Data Feed Library)  Application Database for configuration, schedule information for data refresh  Timer Jobs Removes cached data files on the servers if workbooks are deleted or modified  PowerPivot Web Service and managed extension Handles requests between clients and PowerPivot for SharePoint

PowerPivot and Reporting Services Exciting things happen when both are installed together  A report can be used as a data source in PowerPivot  New reports can be created from PowerPivot workbooks Requires SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services

Programmatic Interfaces AMO  Analysis management objects allows you to query the properties and structures of PowerPivot workbook in the farm  You can query, but you cannot create or modify AS objects. Only Excel 2010 can be used to modify PowerPivot workbooks

Data Storage Requirements PowerPivot workbooks will be stored in SharePoint  Workbooks contain their data (remember our compression ratio)? These workbooks can get very large  SharePoint officially can only hold 2GB files (even with RBS)  Versioning enabled on a PowerPivot document library could pose significant storage issues

Server versus Client Processing SharePoint 2010 is 64bit  PowerPivot workbooks that are created in a 64bit environment with a correspondingly high amount of memory will work great on a similar environments Clients are not a server  Clients that try to tackle a workbook that has lots of data may not be successful (lack memory and processor capabilities of a server)  Evaluate the client infrastructure and ensure all users can take advantage of your PowerPivot workbooks If working with more than 1 Million rows, you should be 64bit client

PowerPivot Monitoring Server Status  CPU and Memory Utilization  System Capacity and Performance  Workbook and User Activity over Time Quality of Service  Query Response Times  Current Server State  Largest and Most Popular Solutions Solution Statistics and Monitoring  Document Information and Data Sources  Activity and Top Users  Query Performance per Workbook

Lab 1: Power Pivot Install PowerPivot for Excel Install PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010

Lab 2: Use Power Pivot Create PowerPivot Workbooks Configure PowerPivot for SharePoint Upload PowerPivot Workbooks to SharePoint

Review Your instructor will ask a series of questions on this module

Summary PowerPivot is a powerful extension to Excel Various new functions and tools give Excel true BI capabilities