Azure Analysis Services – An Overview
Azure just announced a service call Azure Analysis Services which basically targets the BI Professionals to dump their huge data and take out meaningful Information from the chunks of data collected from different sources. Most of the new data is existing in cloud but still a large amount of data is still residing inside the 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 which targets to solve this particular problem in a more streamlined Manner that means you can setup your whole life cycle of Data analysis.
A typical BI professional has to do the some of the tedious tasks like finding the right source of data, transform it and add some business logic and then consume it to give out some real statistics but with Azure Analysis Services the whole task becomes streamlined and the BI professional can directly connect the 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 the 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 will come in handy to use this.
As an offering from Cloud we get some out of the box benefits with it like you can quickly spin up a new server without having to worry about Infrastructure, you can scale up and down as per your requirements, Utility Computing which means you only have to pay for what you use for this the User can just pause the server when its not in used and the user will not be charged for that duration of time. Also, 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 and due to the fact its 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 kind of sources residing in cloud and On-Premises.