Tabular post round-up

When I worked at Microsoft on the Analysis Services team, I posted a great deal of content about the tabular model on my MSDN blog. For those of you who haven’t seen those posts before, they’re definitely worth a review. Here they are by category.

All about the tabular designer

This is about how the tools are designed. Once you understand how we built the tabular designer, and how tabular projects work under the covers, you can use the tools most effectively.

• Tabular designer architecture
• Tabular project structure
• New for RC0 – the .layout file
• Configuring a workspace database server
• Where does data come from when you open a BIM file?
• Working with backups in the tabular designer
• What does import from PowerPivot actually do?
• Working with the ACE provider in the tabular designer

Core tabular modeling functionality

This is some core conceptual material around tabular model features (security, scale, DirectQuery, etc).

• The BI Semantic Model, MDX, DAX, and you
• When to choose tabular models over PowerPivot models
• Securing your tabular model
• DirectQuery 101
• Configuring multiple partitions in a DirectQuery model
• Impersonation in tabular models
• DirectQuery impersonation options explained
• Collation and language settings in tabular models
• Dealing with large row sets in the tabular designer

Management, administration, and automation

Obviously this is a space where the Analysis Services team could improve the documentation. I get asked for information about how to manage models all the time. Here is my collection of posts on the topic so far.

• Managing tabular models using PowerShell
• Processing tabular models 101
• Managing tabular models
• Using Integration Services with tabular models
• Deploying tabular projects using a custom msbuild task
• Pointing PowerPivot pivot tables to tabular models

Tips and tricks

Finally, a grab bag

• Importing from cryptic errors thrown when importing from PowerPivot
• PowerPivot measures command – no really, don’t modify it manually
• Least discoverable feature: importing more tables from an existing connection
• Changing your font and keyboard shortcuts in the tabular designer
• Making tabular models more sensitive
• Recovering your model when you can’t save the BIM file
• Importing a subset of data using partitions
• Using Edit Table Properties on a partitioned tabular model

Bonus: the DAX Editor

Not a blog post, but a project. The DAX Editor is a Visual Studio add-in for editing those DAX expressions and queries. Pick it up from CodePlex.