SSAS TABULAR VS MULTIDIMENSIONAL INSTALL
SSAS TABULAR VS MULTIDIMENSIONAL PLUS

Unlike the SSAS multi-dimensional engine thereĪre no additional data structures created in the xVelocity engine for hierarchies. Hierarchies in tabular are just a named set of columns in the metadata. The reason the article does not mention 'aggregations along hierarchies' is because this is a multi-dimension feature. However if you are targeting business users that want to use tools like Excel Pivottables or Power BI Dashboards then SSAS Tabular will offer a much richer experience.īut it's also not just an exclusive choice, you can have hybrid solutions where you have a SSAS Tabular direct query model over tables with columnstore indexes (which can be good if you need very low latency for data updates) So if the primary users are SQL users that are comfortable writing selects and joins then column store is probably the best choice. The Tabular Model reads data directly from the cache, whereas the Multi-dimensional M odel reads the pre-aggregated data from the disk. Way that it 'sits behind' a traditional RDBMS database schema. So, if you create a Tabular model, you only can deploy it to Tabular installation of SSAS and the same for Multi Dimensional you can not convert those model to each other.

SSAS TABULAR VS MULTIDIMENSIONAL INSTALL

When you install SQL Server, you have to choose which one you are going to install.

While column store is implemented in such a Tabular and Multi Dimensional are completely different thing. Tabular brings a rich metadata layer with predefined relationships, calculated measures and a built-in security model. I think the primary difference between these two technologies is the user experience. If raw speed is your primary consideration then SSAS tabular will always have a slight edge, but I don't see this as the primary factor in the decision between these two technologies. Just restoring a 2012 database onto a 2016 Tabular server.

SSAS TABULAR VS MULTIDIMENSIONAL PLUS

Power BI's own models are build on the same engine as Tabular models hence there is a better 'understanding' between Power BI and Tabular than Power BI and Multidimensional. Plus SSAS Tabular has a larger default segment size which should often result in better compression (meaning less bytes to scan). But if you can build the cube you need in Tabular then I would go that way. It would be interesting to see if Alberto has revisited this for 2016 as we've been testing 2016 performance recently and have seen some 10x performance improvements There is still some very nice features in Multidimensional that isn't available in Tabular.

That article was written in 2012, which was v1 for both Tabular and Columnstore indexes.

Ssas tabular vs multidimensional