Built on the proven analytics engine in Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, Azure Analysis Services delivers enterprise-grade BI semantic modeling capabilities with the scale, flexibility, and management benefits of the cloud. The success of any modern data-driven organization requires that information is available at the fingertips of every business user, not just IT professionals and data scientists, to guide their day-to-day decisions. Azure Analysis Services helps you transform complex data into actionable insights. Users in your organization can then connect to your data models using tools like Excel, Power BI, and many others to create reports and perform ad-hoc interactive analysis.
I joined Scott on Azure Friday to talk about some new features in Azure Analysis Services. Query scale out and diagnostic logging were announced at the SQL PASS Summit 2017 and both lend themselves particularly well to the cloud.
- Query scale out for Azure Analysis Services allows client queries to be distributed among multiple query replicas in a query pool, reducing response times during high query workloads. You can also separate processing from the query pool, ensuring client queries are not adversely affected by processing operations. If you have ever set up scale out on premises, you might be shocked to know the implementation is basically a simple slider bar in Azure!
- Diagnostic logging is a key feature of IT-owned BI implementations, allowing various insights for auditing, monitoring of server health, usage statistics, and identification of long-running user queries. It is also much quicker and easier to set up than on premises, leveraging the Azure Diagnostic Logs platform.
Learn more about Azure Analysis Services.