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

2. 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 –http://www.nycdotnetdev.comhttp://www.nycdotnetdev.com “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, tweeting @andrewbrust

3. Read all about it!

4. Why Self-Service BI? “Spreadmarts” exist, no matter what: –Power users like Excel, but… –No true db or OLAP engine –Email 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. The Simple View

8. The Detailed View

9. 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 14390000 238100000 335100000 Employee ID123 Age433835 Income90000100000

10. 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

11. The Ribbons Excel 2010: PowerPivot Client:

12. 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

13. DEMO PowerPivot Client Data Modeling

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

15. DEMO Data Feed and Report Data Imports

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

17. 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

18. DEMO Relationships and Calculated Columns

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

20. DEMO Querying PowerPivot Data in Excel

21. 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

22. DEMO PowerPivot on the Server

23. 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

24. 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

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

26. Resources Web Sites: –http://www.powerpivot.comhttp://www.powerpivot.com –http://www.powerpivot-info.comhttp://www.powerpivot-info.com Blogs –http://blogs.msdn.com/powerpivot (team)http://blogs.msdn.com/powerpivot –http://powerpivotpro.com (Rob Collie)http://powerpivotpro.com –http://powerpivottwins.com (Denny Lee and Dave Wickert)http://powerpivottwins.com –http://powerpivotgeek.com (Dave Wickert)http://powerpivotgeek.com Documentation: –Server: http://tinyurl.com/GeminiServerDocshttp://tinyurl.com/GeminiServerDocs –DAX reference: http://bit.ly/1eBXJQhttp://bit.ly/1eBXJQ Social networks: –http://www.twitter.com/andrewbrust/powerpivothttp://www.twitter.com/andrewbrust/powerpivot –http://www.facebook.com/PowerPivothttp://www.facebook.com/PowerPivot Hands-on-Lab (developed by 26NY for MS)

27. Questions? @andrewbrust on Twitter andrew.brust@26ny.com