Pre-requisite Knowledge
Before we start with the understanding of what is Azure Analysis Service, we should have:
Introduction and features
- Azure analysis services are used to build the analytics solutions in Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
- This service is built on top of SQL server analysis service and it supports tabular models at 1200 and higher.
- Azure Analysis Services is fully managed which provides enterprise grade data models in the cloud.
Image Source – Microsoft Docs
- This service comes under the Platform as a Service (PaaS) category in the Azure cloud.
- By using this service, we can merge the data from multiple data sources, define the metrics and secure the data.
- This service provides features to combine the multiple data sources which delivers a single Business intelligence model. Final model will be easy to understand to generate more meaningful data insights.
- This service provides users the ability to perform the analytics on the data in the quickest way and can connect to the real time operational data.
- By using Azure Resource Manager, we can quickly create and deploy the Azure analysis services in the cloud.
- We can scale up, scale down and pause the services in the Azure cloud and will pay as we use.
- We can scale out; client queries are distributed into multiple query replicas in a query pool.
- Azure analysis service provides high security to the data using role-based access security, Azure active directory, row level security, object level security, firewall protection etc.
- Business users can access the data anytime, anywhere as they need.
- Microsoft claims 99.9% availability for this service.
- We can create, deploy and manage this service using multiple tools choices like Visual Studio, SQL Server Management Studio, PowerShell etc.
- It has integration with the most popular BI visualization tools like Power BI, Excel, Reporting Services, and third-party tools are all supported.
- We can easily monitor this service in the cloud since it is integrated with the Azure metrics too.
- At last this is enterprise grade analytics engine as a service in the Microsoft Azure cloud.
Reference Links
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/services/analysis-services/
- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/analysis-services/analysis-services-overview
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/product-categories/analytics/
Conclusion
In this article we have learned an overview of Azure Analysis Service.