It has been a long wait, but finally our book about Analysis Services Tabular is available!

bismtabularbookMicrosoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services: The BISM Tabular Model

Amazon is already shipping it in US and it should be available soon also in Europe. However, the Kindle edition is already available everywhere! If you like to order it on Amazon, here are the links for all the shops:

You can follow this link to take a look at the Table of Contents, at the Introduction and some content of other chapters. I suggest you to read the introduction and the “Who Should Read This Book” section before buying the book, so you will be sure you are getting the right one. Well, if you read this blog, you should be in the right target audience, but double check is not bad.

For your convenience, this is the list of the chapters:

  • Chapter 1 Introducing the Tabular Model
  • Chapter 2 Getting Started with the Tabular Model
  • Chapter 3 Loading Data Inside Tabular
  • Chapter 4 DAX Basics
  • Chapter 5 Understanding Evaluation Context
  • Chapter 6 Querying Tabular
  • Chapter 7 DAX Advanced
  • Chapter 8 Understanding Time Intelligence in DAX
  • Chapter 9 Understanding xVelocity and DirectQuery
  • Chapter 10 Building Hierarchies
  • Chapter 11 Data Modeling in Tabular
  • Chapter 12 Using Advanced Tabular Relationships
  • Chapter 13 The Tabular Presentation Layer
  • Chapter 14 Tabular and PowerPivot
  • Chapter 15 Security
  • Chapter 16 Interfacing with Tabular
  • Chapter 17 Tabular Deployment
  • Chapter 18 Optimizations and Monitoring
  • Appendix A DAX Functions Reference

We already received a good review but I hope to see many others – of course we all like the good ones, but we always look carefully at every comment so that we can improve the next one!

I’d like to give a big thank you to all the people who helped us reaching this goal. I know we set an ambitious target, trying to cover a brand new engine and development environment in a very deep way despite its infancy on the market. I think that this is just the first step in this new world, Tabular will evolve and we’ll gain more experience working with it on real word projects. But I hope that many BI developers will find it easier to start a new Tabular project with the guidance of this book. We have found that Tabular is good not only for “simple” models, but also for the complex ones, when Multidimensional faced some limitations in term of leaf-level calculation. I still don’t use Tabular for any new project, there are still many scenarios in which Multidimensional is a better choice, but don’t wait too much to start playing with DAX and Tabular. You might miss some real opportunities.

I hope you will enjoy the reading!