Azure Analysis Services Features and Functionality Overview

Azure Analysis Services is a powerful tool that allows you to create, manage, and deploy semantic models in the cloud.

It provides a scalable and secure platform for data modeling, enabling you to create complex data relationships and hierarchies.

With Azure Analysis Services, you can deploy models to multiple instances, allowing for high availability and disaster recovery.

This flexibility makes it an ideal choice for large-scale enterprise deployments.

Azure Analysis Services supports multiple data sources, including relational databases, multidimensional databases, and data warehouses.

This allows you to integrate data from various sources into a single, unified model.

The tool also supports real-time data processing, enabling you to respond quickly to changing business conditions.

This is particularly useful in applications where data is constantly being updated or added.

Azure Analysis Services provides a range of features and functionality, including data modeling, data processing, and data visualization.

These features make it an essential tool for any organization looking to gain insights from its data.

Azure Analysis Services offers two main pricing tiers: Standard and Basic.

The Standard tier is ideal for mission-critical production applications with rapidly growing data models, supporting advanced data refresh and all tabular modeling features. It comes in various plans, each with a different number of QPUs (Query Processing Units) and memory.

Here are the plans available in the Standard tier:

Note that S8 and S9 are deprecated, and v2 is recommended.

Azure pricing and plans can be a bit complex, but let's break it down. You can get a walkthrough of Azure pricing to understand how it works for your cloud solution.

Total cost depends on several factors, including your chosen region, tier, query replicas, and pause/resume. The Azure Analysis Services Pricing calculator can help you determine typical pricing for your region.

Query replicas are billed at the same rate as the server, so keep that in mind when calculating costs.

The cost of using Azure Analysis Services is generally lower than Power BI Premium Capacity in most cases. However, you need to add the cost of Power BI Pro licenses required for report development to either option.

The standard tier is best suited for mission-critical production applications that require elastic user-concurrency, and have rapidly growing data models. It has advanced data refresh capability that helps customers achieve near real-time data model updates.

This tier is for mission-critical production applications that require elastic user-concurrency, and have rapidly growing data models. It supports advanced data refresh for near real-time data model updates, and supports all tabular modeling features.

Here's a look at the different plans available in the standard tier:

Note that S8 and S9 are deprecated, and S8v2 and S9v2 are recommended instead.

The Basic tier is a great starting point for many projects. It's recommended for production solutions with small Tabular models and limited user concurrency.

This tier is well-suited for simple data refresh requirements. You can expect standard data transfer rates.

The Basic tier is available in two plans: B1 and B2. Here's a quick rundown of what you can expect from each:

Keep in mind that query replica scale-out is not available for this tier. If you need more advanced features like Perspectives, multiple partitions, or DirectQuery tabular model features, you'll want to consider a different tier.

You can scale out instances to a primary instance for faster data and query processing. Scale out instances are priced at the same rate as primary instances.

With scale-out, client queries are distributed among multiple query replicas in a query pool, reducing response times during high query workloads.

You can create a query pool with up to seven additional query replicas (eight total, including your server), depending on your chosen plan and region.

Here are the available scale out instances:

Power BI is faster than Azure Analysis Services, especially when dealing with high concurrency and large datasets.

Horizontal scale out is a great way to boost performance and speed up data processing. You can add scale out instances to your primary instance to handle heavy workloads.

The good news is that scale out instances are priced at the same rate as primary instances, making it a cost-effective solution.

Here's a breakdown of the available scale out instances:

Standard data transfer rates apply, and monthly price estimates are based on 730 hours per month. This means you can scale out as needed without worrying about unexpected charges.

Memory usage can be a significant concern when scaling up your data models. Azure Analysis Services has scale limits per server, while Power BI Premium’s limits are per model.

Power BI Gen2 can be a more cost-effective option when working with multiple data models. This is because it doesn’t have the same scale limits as Azure Analysis Services.

Only about 70% of memory can be dedicated to store data models in Azure Analysis Services. The remaining 30% needs to be treated as a buffer for query processing and user activities when memory in Power BI Premium Capacity is fully utilized.

Azure Analysis Services provides security for your sensitive data at multiple levels. At the server level, it offers firewall, Azure authentication, server administrator roles, and Server-Side Encryption.

Data security is also ensured through Azure Blob Server Side Encryption (SSE), which encrypts data files within Blob storage. This means that your data is safe and gets seen by only those users who are meant to see it.

Azure Analysis Services uses Azure Blob storage to persist storage and metadata for Analysis Services databases, which is a secure way to store data.

To access data sources on-premises, an On-premises data gateway is required, which provides access to data for both DirectQuery and in-memory modes.

Azure Analysis Services provides multiple levels of security for sensitive data, including Basic level protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which is automatically enabled as part of the Azure platform.

Firewall protection is also available, blocking all client connections except those specified in rules, and it's recommended to enable it and configure rules as part of a server provisioning script or in the portal immediately after the server is created.

At the server level, Azure Analysis Services provides additional security features such as Azure authentication, server administrator roles, and Server-Side Encryption to ensure data is safe and secure.

Row-level security is supported in Tabular models at all compatibility levels, configured in the model using DAX expressions that define the rows in a table that a user can query.

Object-level security is also supported, including table-level security and column-level security, which can be set in the JSON-based metadata using TMSL or TOM.

Azure Analysis Services uses Azure Blob storage to persist storage and metadata for Analysis Services databases, with data files encrypted using Azure Blob Server Side Encryption.

Power BI Premium may not meet the data governance and protection requirements of some organizations, but Azure Analysis Services offers more granular security controls, including access to Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) and Content Level Security settings.

Reviewing the Service Level Agreement for Azure Analysis Services is a crucial step in ensuring data security and compliance.

SLA provides a framework for understanding the expected uptime and performance of Azure Analysis Services.

Reviewing the SLA helps you understand the terms and conditions of your Azure services, including the expected uptime and performance.

Azure Analysis Services SLA guarantees a minimum of 99.9% uptime for the service, which translates to only 43 minutes of downtime per month.

This means you can rely on Azure Analysis Services to be available and performant for your business-critical applications.

To review the SLA, simply log in to your Azure account and navigate to the Azure Analysis Services dashboard, where you can access the SLA documentation.