Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint

Chapter 13. Business Intelligence Semantic Model (BISM)

In the previous chapter, we reviewed the Microsoft business intelligence offering as it existed before the release of SQL Server 2012. Microsoft was seen by Gartner as a dominant player in the BI space with significant enterprise adoption of Analysis Services due to a low cost and minimal barrier to entry given the large installed base of SQL Server. With the release of SQL Server 2008 R2, Microsoft shipped add-ins to Excel and SharePoint that brought a new simplified model for end user and community business intelligence named PowerPivot. PowerPivot leveraged a new in-memory storage model that allowed end users to manipulate millions of rows of data within Excel and SharePoint. Both of these offerings were well received, but left Microsoft with a fractured product offering; one product for BI professionals and another for self-service. With the release of SQL Server 2012, Microsoft unifies the platform with the Business Intelligence Semantic Model, or BISM.

Why Business Intelligence Semantic Model?

BISM is the next generation of Analysis Services. BISM extends analysis services and opens up development to a new generation users. Today’s power users are more familiar with relational data structures then traditional star schema structures that are used for traditional OLAP databases. BISM brings the familiar relational data model to the BI platform and unifies it with the multidimensional model. This added flexibility within Analysis ...