Developing Business Intelligence Apps for SharePoint

Chapter 18. SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)

One of the best things about the Microsoft business intelligence stack is the ability to scale from solutions designed and run within Excel, to collaborative solutions published to SharePoint Server, to enterprise-scalable solutions running on high-powered Analysis Services. This flexibility of designing in Excel allows you the agility as IT professionals to respond to the needs of the business and deliver real value when your customers need it. If you ever dreamt as a child of being a magician or a superhero, PowerPivot is your chance to do that at work. You will literally hear your customers gasp when you show them what you built in an afternoon. That ability to impress may get you nominated for your next promotion. However, this amazing newfound success brings with it a new set of challenges for us to address: How do we manage and control the solution? What about scalability? What about security?

The power of Analysis Services allows you to deliver scalability and the IT governance required for business-critical applications. When you find that you’ve created something really important in PowerPivot, it may be time to consider scaling up. In this chapter, we’ll hit the highlights around why you would choose to “go SSAS” and how you can do it easily.

Scalability

PowerPivot has a 2 GB limit for the size of the Excel file. If you are running a solution in Excel on your local machine, the resources available may further impact your maximum ...