Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Analysis Services: The BISM Tabular Model

Introduction

When we, the authors of this book, first learned what Microsoft’s plans were for Analysis Services in the SQL Server 2012 release, we were not happy. Analysis Services hadn’t acquired much in the way of new features since 2005, even though in the meantime it had grown to become the biggest-selling OLAP tool. It seemed as if Microsoft had lost interest in the product. The release of PowerPivot and all the hype surrounding self-service Business Intelligence (BI) suggested that Microsoft was no longer interested in traditional corporate BI, or even that Microsoft thought professional BI developers were irrelevant in a world where end users could build their own BI applications directly in Excel. Then, when Microsoft announced that the ...