Azure just announced a Service known as Azure Analysis Services, which basically allows the BI Professionals to dump their huge data and extract meaningful Information from the chunk of data collected from the different sources. Most of the new data exists in the Cloud but still a large amount of data is residing inside On Premises Servers. Due to the increase in the number of devices, the amount of data increased massively in last few years and there comes the problem of taking out some useful Information in the form of data analysis. Azure Analysis Service is a new fully managed PAAS offering targets to solve this particular problem in a more streamlined manner, which means you can set up your whole lifecycle of data analysis.
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A typical BI professional has to do some of the tedious tasks like finding the right source of data, transforming it and adding some business logic and then consuming it to give out some real statistics but with Azure Analysis Services, the whole task becomes streamlined and BI professionals can directly connect Power BI or Excel to the Azure Analysis Service and leave the tedious task for this Service with the power of Cloud.
It’s built on top of SQL Server Analysis Services, so all the “good parts” of the SQL Server Analysis Services comes as a bonus package to Azure Analysis Service, so basically you can make use of your existing SQL data and existing knowledge of SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Server Reporting Services, SQL Server Profiler and Visual Studio tooling for SQL, which will come in handy to use.
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As an offering from the Cloud, we get some out of the box benefits with it like Scalability and Utility Computing, which means you only have to pay for what you use. For it, the user can just pause the Server when it's not in use and the user will not be charged for that duration of time. As a part of Azure offering, you can make use of the Azure Active Directory integration for Identity and RBAC for their models.
Summary
Azure Analysis Service is a PAAS offering from Azure due to the fact that it's built of top of SQL Server Analysis Service and Azure. It seems to be very promising for the development and production based scenarios to take out the data from different kinds of sources residing in the Cloud and On-Premises.