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November 2024

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#26: Decide how to source your data in Analysis Services and stick with it.

Ideally you will source your data from a correctly modeled star schema. Even then you may need to massage the source data before feeding it into SSAS. There are two ways of accomplishing this: Through views in the database or through data source views (dimensional) or queries (tabular). Unless you are unable to create views in your database (running on a prod system etc) I would strongly suggest using them. This will give you a clean separation of logic and abstraction between the SSAS solution and the data source. This means that clients connecting to the data warehouse directly will see the same data model as the SSAS solution. Also migrating between different front-ends (like dimensional and tabular) will become much simpler. In my solutions I never connect to tables directly I always bind to views for everything and never implement any logic in the DSV or via queries.

#27: Have some way of defining “current” time periods in your SSAS solution

Most SSAS solutions have a time dimension with dates, months, years, etc. In many ways its the most important dimension in your solution as it will be included in most reports / analyses as well as form the basis for a lot of calculations (see previous tips). Having a notion of what is the current period in your time dimension will greatly improve the usability of your solution: Reports will automatically be populated with the latest data without any user interaction. It can also simplify ad-hoc analysis by setting the default members to the most current date / month / year so that when users do not put these on one of the axes it will default to the most recent time period. There are a number of ways of implementing this including calculated members and named sets (for dimensional) and calculations for Tabular and the internet is abundant with sample solutions. Some of them are fully automated (using VBA time functions) and some require someone to manually set the current period. I prefer to use the latter if possible to avoid reports showing incorrect data if something went wrong in the ETL.

#28: Create a testable solution

This is a really big topic so I will emphasize what I have found most important. A BI solution has a lot of moving parts. You have your various source systems, your ETL pipeline, logic in the database, logic in your SSAS solution and finally logic in your reporting solution. Errors happen in all of these layers but your integration services solution is probably the most vulnerable part. Not only do technically errors occur, but far more costly are logic errors where your numbers don’t match what is expected. Luckily there are a lot of things you can do to help identify when these errors occur. As mentioned in tips #6 and #7 you should use a framework. You should also design your solution to be unit testable. This boils down to creating lots of small packages that can be run in isolation rather than large complex ones. Most importantly you should create validation queries that compares the data you load in your ETL with data in the source systems. How these queries are crafted varies from system to system but a good starting point would be comparisons of row counts, sums of measures (facts) and number of unique values. The way I do it is that I create the test before building anything. So if I am to load customers that have changed since X, I first create the test query for the source system (row counts, distinct values etc.) then the query for the data warehouse together with a comparison query and finally I start building the actual integration. Ideally you will package this into a SSIS solution that logs the results into a table. This way you can utilize your validation logic both while developing the solution but also once its deployed. If you are running SQL Server 2012 you might want to look into the data tap features of SSIS that lets you inspect data flowing through your pipeline from the outside.

#29: Avoid the source if you are scaling for a large number of users

Building a BI solution to scale is another very large topic. If you have lots of data you need to scale your ETL, Database and SSAS subsystems. But if you have lots of users (thousands) your bottleneck will probably be SSAS. Concurrently handling tens to hundreds of queries with acceptable performance is just not feasible. The most effective thing is to avoid this as much as possible. I usually take a two pronged approach. Firstly I implement as much as possible as standard (“canned”) reports that can be cached. Reporting Services really shines in these scenarios. It allows for flexible caching schemes that in most circumstances eliminates all trips to the data source. This will usually cover around 70-80% of requirements. Secondly I deploy an ad-hoc cube specifically designed and tuned for exploratory reporting and analysis. I talked about this in tip #17. In addition you need to consider your underlying infrastructure. Both SSRS and SSAS can be scaled up and out. For really large systems you will need to do both, even with the best of caching schemes.

#30: Stick with your naming standards

There are a lot objects that need to be named in a solution. From the more technical objects such as database tables and SSIS packages to objects exposed to users such as SSAS dimensions and measures. The most important thing with naming conventions is not what they are, but that they are implemented. As I talked about in tip #24 changing a name can have far reaching consequences. This is not just a matter of things breaking if you change them but consider all of the support functionality in the platform such as logging that utilize object names. Having meaningful, consistent names will make it a heck of a lot easier to get value out of this. So at the start of the project I would advise to have a “naming meeting” where you agree upon how you will name your objects. Should dimension tables be prefixed with Dim or Dim_? Should Dimension names be plural (CustomerS) or singular (Customer), etc.

#11: Manage your own surrogate keys.

In SQL Server it is common to use an INT or BIGINT set as IDENTITY to create unique, synthetic keys. The number is a sequence and a new value is generated when we execute an insert. There are some issues with this. Quite often we need this value in our Integration Services solution to do logging and efficient loads of the data warehouse (there will be a separate tip on this). This means that sometimes we need the value before an insert and sometimes after. You can obtain the last value generated by issuing a SCOPE_IDENTITY command but this will require an extra trip to the server per row flowing through your pipeline. Obtaining the value before an insert happens is not possible in a safe way. A better option is to generate the keys yourself through a script component. Google for “ssis surrogate key” and you will find a lot of examples.

#12: Excel should be your default front-end tool.

I know this is a little bit controversial. Some say Excel lacks the power of a “real” BI tool. Others say it writes inefficient queries. But hear me out. Firstly, if you look at where Microsoft is making investments in the BI stack, Excel is right up there at the top. Contrast that to what they are doing with PerformancePoint and Reporting Services and its pretty clear that Excel is the most future proof of the lot. Microsoft have added lot of BI features over the last couple of releases and continue to expand it through new add-ins such as data explorer and geoflow. Additionally, the integration with SharePoint gets tighter and tighter. The Excel web client of SharePoint 2013 is pretty on par with the fat Excel client when it comes to BI functionality. This means that you can push out the new features to users who have not yet upgraded to the newer versions of Excel. When it comes to the efficiency with which Excel queries SSAS a lot has become better. But being a general analysis tool it will never be able to optimize its queries as you would if you wrote them specifically for a report.Please note that I am saying “default” not “best”. Of course there are better, pure bred, Business Intelligence front-ends out there. Some of them even have superior integration with SSAS. But its hard to beat the cost-value ratio of Excel if you are already running a Microsoft shop. If you add in the fact that many managers and knowledge workers already do a lot of work in Excel and know the tool well the equation becomes even more attractive.

#13: Hug an infrastructure expert that knows BI workloads.

Like most IT solutions, Microsoft BI solutions are only as good as the hardware and server configurations they run on. Getting this right is very difficult and requires deep knowledge in operating systems, networks, physical hardware, security and the software that is going to run on these foundations. To make matters worse, BI solutions have workloads that often differ fundamentally from line of business applications in the way they access system resources and services. If you work with a person that knows both of these aspects you should give him or her a hug every day because they are a rare breed. Typically BI consultants know a lot about the characteristics of BI workloads but nothing about how to configure hardware and software to support these. Infrastructure consultants on the other hand know a lot about hardware and software but nothing about the specific ways BI solutions access these. Here are three examples: Integration Services is mainly memory constrained. It is very efficient at processing data as a stream as long as there is enough memory for it. The instant it runs out of memory and starts swapping to disk you will see a dramatic decrease in performance. So if you are doing heavy ETL, co-locating this with other memory hungry services on the same infrastructure is probably a bad idea. The other example is the way data is loaded and accessed in data warehouses. Unlike business systems that often do random data access (“Open the customer card for Henry James”) data warehouses are sequential. Batches of transactions are loaded into the warehouse and data is retrieved by reports / analysis services models in batches. This has a significant impact on how you should balance the hardware and configuration of your SQL Server database engine and differs fundamentally from how you handle workloads from business applications. The last example may sound extreme but is something I have encountered multiple times. When businesses outsource their infrastructure to a third party they give up some of the control and knowledge in exchange for an ability to “focus on their core business”. This is a good philosophy with real value. Unfortunately if you do not have anyone on the requesting side of this partnership that knows what to ask for when ordering infrastructure for your BI project what you get can be pretty far off from what you need. Recently a client of mine made such a request for a SQL Server based data warehouse server. The hosting partner followed their SLA protocol and supplied a high availability configuration with a mandatory full recovery model for all databases. You can imagine the exploding need for disk space for the transaction logs when loading batches of 20 million rows each night. As these examples illustrate, it is critical for a successful BI implementation to have people with infrastructure competency on your BI team that also understand how BI solutions differ from “traditional” business solutions and can apply the right infrastructure configurations.

#14: Use Team Foundation Server for your BI projects too.

A couple of years ago putting Microsoft BI projects under source control was a painful experience where the benefits drowned in a myriad of technical issues. This has improved a lot. Most BI artifacts now integrate well with TFS and BI teams can greatly benefit from all the functionality provided by the product such as source control, issue tracking and reporting. Especially for larger projects with multiple developers working against the same solution TFS is the way to go in order to be able to work effectively in parallel. As an added benefit you will sleep better at night knowing that you can roll back that dodgy check-in you performed a couple of hours ago. With that said there are still issues with the TFS integration. SSAS data source views are a constant worry as are server and database roles. But all of this (including workarounds) is pretty well documented online.

#15: Enforce your attribute relationships.

This is mostly related to SSAS dimensional but you should also keep it in mind when working with tabular. Attribute relationships define how attributes of a dimension relate to each other (roll up into each other). For example would products roll up into product subgroups which would again roll into product groups. This is a consequence of the denormalization process many data warehouse models go through where complex relationships are flattened out into wide dimension tables. These relationships should be definied in SSAS to boost general performance. The magic best-practice analyzer built into data tools makes sure you remember this with its blue squiggly lines. Usually it takes some trial and error before you get it right but in the end you are able to process your dimension without those duplicate attribute key errors. If you still don’t know what I am talking about look it up online such as here. So far so good. Problems start arising when these attribute relationships are not enforced in your data source, typically a data warehouse. Continuing with the example from earlier over time you might get the same product subgroup referencing different product groups (“parents”). This is not allowed and will cause a processing of the dimension to fail in SSAS (those pesky duplicate key errors). To handle this a bit more gracefully than simply leaving your cube(s) in an unprocessed state (with the angry phone calls this brings with it) you should enforce the relationship at the ETL level, in Integration Services. When loading a dimension you should reject / handle cases where these relationships are violated and notify someone that this happened. The process should make sure that the integrity of the model is maintained by assigning “violators” to a special member of the parent attribute that marks it as “suspect”. In this way your cubes can still be processed while highlighting data that needs attention.

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What other advice do I have?

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and support?

How was the initial setup?

What other advice do I have?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and support?

How was the initial setup?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

What other advice do I have?

What is our primary use case?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

How are customer service and support?

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

How was the initial setup?

What about the implementation team?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

What other advice do I have?

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

What is most valuable?

What needs improvement?

For how long have I used the solution?

What other advice do I have?