Creating your first project in BI Semantic Model for SQL Server 2012

SSAS Tabular Project Part 1

Hello!

We at SQLServerGeeks.com are committed to spread the knowledge as we gain in the process of evaluating the newly released SQL Server 2012 CTP 3 release code named “Denali”.

This post comes as a supplementary addition to the earlier post which describes how to configure SSAS in Tabular Mode and create tabular model.

In this post we shall have a walkthrough on how to create a tabular project which later can be used for data analysis.

The first task after you have correctly configured a new SSAS engine instance to create tabular project, is to get data. This can be done in many ways. Click on the Model menu at the top (or Alt+O) which will then allow data modelers to import data from a variety of data stores. For the sake of simplicity I will use MS SQL Server and AdventureWorksDWDenali as the source and in the impersonation information I have used the credentials of the current windows user.

The user can import data either from the import wizard and allow the wizard to do the hard work or compose a SQL which will import the data.

For this project and all the following blog posts I will use the basic schema where there is a customer, product, product category, product subcategory, and date and interest sales for data analysis.

The import wizard utility allows the modeler to give user friendly names to tables (FactInternetSales can be renamed as Internet Sales) and filter details as deemed necessary. Note: As a best practice, fetch data what is required for analysis, nothing less nothing more.

The import wizard will now run the necessary SQL and fetch the data from the underlying data stores and a BISM is now ready for analysis and reporting requirements.

That’s all. Now in the next post we shall see how to add calculated columns and many other features.

Happy Learning!