Category: SQL Server

Administartion, BISM Multidimensional, SQL Server Analysis Services - SSAS

An Easy Way for SSAS Batch Processing

Batch processing is available in Analysis Services. Which means we can send multiple processing commands to the server in just a single SQL Server Job. With SSAS batch processing we can control which objects to be processed and in what order in a batch.  As batch processing reduces the amount of time taken to commit changes it offers better data availability. We can easily generate XMLA codes  for batch processing through SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio). You might see lots of discussions about this in other websites and lots of them are saying you need to right click on the objects one by one and generate the scripts. Then put all scripts together in another XMLA script. But it is such a pain when you have lots of objects that should be selected one after another to generate the batch processing XMLA. Sadly, it is not the end of the story. You need put all scripts together by copying and pasting the scripts several times. Today I want to show you a very easy to the job which saves lots of your time.

I’m using “Adventure Works 2012 Multidimensional” as an example and I’m going to batch process some dimensions.

  • Connect to the SSAS server from Management Studio
  • Expand the database
  • Expand dimensions

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BISM Tabular, Business Intelligence - BI, SQL Server, SQL Server Analysis Services - SSAS, T-SQL

How To Implement a Composite Key In SSAS Tabular Model

As you might know SSAS tabular models do not support composite keys so you always must have just one column to make a unique row through the whole table. This is such a pain especially when you are new to the tabular models and don’t have that much detail information about it. So when you import some tables with existing relationships based on composite keys, the Table Import Wizard will ignore those relationships.

So what should we do to solve the problem?

The solution is to combine the values of the composite keys. 

Here is how you can do the job?

·         Creating a view on top of the source tables:

1.  If you’re using SQL Server 2012 and above you can use the “concat” function to combine the values. The function combines several expressions regardless of their data types. So you can use it like this select CONCAT (1, 1.22100001,‘First’) SQL2012 and the result would be something like this

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2.  If you’re using earlier versions of SQL Server then you need to mind the data types. So for the above sample the SQL code would be select cast(1 as char(1)) + cast(1.22100001 as char(10))+‘First’ SQL2008 . As we expect the result is the same.

·         Adding a new computed column to all tables involved in SQL Server before importing the tables to the tabular model

·         Adding a new calculated column to all tables involved after importing the tables to the tabular model

As a quick note, you’ll need to remove the existing relationships imported from SQL Server and create the new relationship based on the combined keys.

Easy peasy!

Power BI, Power Pivot, SQL Server

Dynamically Passing Parameters to a SQL Stored Procedure from PowerPivot Using VBA

Update September 2022:

I wrote a new blog post covering the same scenario in Excel 365.

In this post, I express an easy way to refresh a PowerPivot model dynamically based on SQL Server Stored Procedures. Let’s start with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 2012 and use Adventure Works 2012 database. Run the following script to see the results in SSMS:

exec [dbo].[uspGetBillOfMaterials] 727, ‘2009-01-02’

First parameter: Start Product ID

Second Parameter: Check Date

Results:

powerpivot01

Now we want to see the results for the following script:

exec [dbo].[uspGetBillOfMaterials] 762, ‘2009-01-02’

 Results:

powerpivot02

Now we want to do the same with PowerPivot.

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Power BI, Power Query, SQL Server

Power Query and SQL Server Stored Procedures

Today I want to explain how you can pass parameters to a SQL Server stored procedure. I myself was looking for a way to pass parameters to a SQL Server stored proc from Power Query. I spent a lot of time to search for a good article over the internet that explains how I could pass parameters to a stored proc from Power Query and show the results in Excel. But, I couldn’t find that much information around this as I expected. So, I decided to do some work around and you can read the results in this post. To simplify the solution, I’m going to use uspGetBillOfMaterials stored procedure in AdventureWorks 2012 database. The stored procedure accepts an integer number as ProductID and a date as CheckDate. So we need to pass two parameters to uspGetBillOfMaterials  to get the results.

If we execute the stored proc in SSMS using

exec [dbo].[uspGetBillOfMaterials] 727, ‘2009-01-02’

, we’ll get the following result:

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Now, lets go to do some works on Power Query. So open Microsoft Excel and go to Power Query tab and select SQL Server database.

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Now type Server, Database and SQL Statement, then click OK.

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