Azure Analysis Services Scales to Meet Demand

Azure Analysis Services is a Microsoft-hosted analytics service based on SQL Server Analysis Services. It provides business intelligence (BI) semantic data modeling for analytical processing and data mining of large, complex data sets. The service can be deployed quickly and scaled to meet demand without significant upfront investment, and it can be paused when not in use to help control costs. Azure Analysis Services has most of the important features of its on-premises parent; however, it is restricted to newer tabular models only and the limited set of supported data sources may require customers to wait for future updates before migrating existing workloads.

Service Overview

Azure Analysis Services is an online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining service, based on SQL Server Analysis Services. Organizations typically use Analysis Services to create semantic data models to analyze data from operational sources, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) databases and other business applications. Models organize data into tables, columns, and metrics (key performance indicators) in a familiar format for users to access with applications and other BI tools for self-service analysis to help guide business decisions. For example, a semantic data model can show columns for sales forecast from a CRM application and actual sales from an ERP application and include calculated columns for variance and performance metric. Models can access the underlying data in real time to provide the latest results or be refreshed on a schedule basis. They can also include the underlying data in the model, which helps with offline analysis.