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chaly10's avatar
chaly10
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9 years ago
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POWER BI AND SSAS Tabular or MULTIDIMENSIONAL?

Does power BI work better with tabular or  multidimensional cubes? can i get all the data and relationships from the cube to PBI? and work with another source in the same report ?

 

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  • v-ljerr-msft's avatar
    v-ljerr-msft
    9 years ago

    Hi chaly10,

    The Power BI Desktop, and all the modeling done in the tool is based on tabular. So it is a seemless transition between any development in the Desktop and what you may do in the model.

    When using MD, Power BI is still using DAX to make calls to the MD cube, so there are some limitations and not all MD features may be supported.

    Tabular (seems) to be where Microsoft is investing the vast majority of resources (based on the SQL 2016 release). It also has the potential to be much faster because it is (or can be) stored in memory, whereas MD is all on disk.

    Another benefit (I'll be blogging on soon) is that you can directly connect your Desktop to the local in memory copy of the model when you are working on it. (looks like <modelname_YourName_GUID>) This is a huge development win for me, as I can test out my measures and calcs against the visuals right away prior to checking them in and deploying them.

     

    If you are already well versed in DAX, my personal opinion is that you head down the tabular route.

    Here is a similar thread about the same question, and the question was well answered there. Could you go to check if it helps? :smileyhappy:

     

    Regards

2 Replies

  • v-ljerr-msft's avatar
    v-ljerr-msft
    Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee
    9 years ago

    Hi chaly10,

    The Power BI Desktop, and all the modeling done in the tool is based on tabular. So it is a seemless transition between any development in the Desktop and what you may do in the model.

    When using MD, Power BI is still using DAX to make calls to the MD cube, so there are some limitations and not all MD features may be supported.

    Tabular (seems) to be where Microsoft is investing the vast majority of resources (based on the SQL 2016 release). It also has the potential to be much faster because it is (or can be) stored in memory, whereas MD is all on disk.

    Another benefit (I'll be blogging on soon) is that you can directly connect your Desktop to the local in memory copy of the model when you are working on it. (looks like <modelname_YourName_GUID>) This is a huge development win for me, as I can test out my measures and calcs against the visuals right away prior to checking them in and deploying them.

     

    If you are already well versed in DAX, my personal opinion is that you head down the tabular route.

    Here is a similar thread about the same question, and the question was well answered there. Could you go to check if it helps? :smileyhappy:

     

    Regards