The last
few years Microsoft's strategy was all about cloud first (or cloud only?), releasing
new BI products and updates to existing products to the cloud in high pace
without almost any investments in on-premises BI. In 2015 Microsoft seems to
change its course, they now aim more on the enabling of hybrid scenarios,
investing a lot in both cloud (Power BI/Azure) and on-premises with SQL Server
2016.
Microsoft’s message regarding BI for 2015/2016 is: “BI on your terms”.
BI on your terms means leveraging up-to-date possibilities for one or a combination (hybrid) of the following architectures:
Cloud with Azure and Power BI
On-Premises with SQL Server 2016
Server driven or Self-Service
To be able to offer quality hybrid architectures Microsoft invests a lot in the on-premises BI suite with SQL Server 2016 and they have announced to keep investing in it the coming years. So not only cloud first like we have seen in previous years, but more on hybrid possibilities, and if you desire on-premises only.
For the first time in many years an exciting version of SQL Server is coming in terms of BI. The main topics are:
Hybrid BI (Cloud/On-Premises)
Modern Reports
Enhanced Analysis
Mobile BI
Below is an overview of the new BI related features per SQL Server 2016 service or product. As the length of this list shows, SQL Server 2016 will be a massive BI version!!
Analysis Services Tabular
Enhanced modeling capabilities in the semantic layer
Many-to-many relationships
BI Directional cross filtering. This means you can not only filter on the 1 side of a 1 to many relationship in your tabular model, but also on the many side. For example, two connected tables, Sales à Product:
Product: product, product category
Sales: sales date, connection to product table
Now select products sold filtering on sales date(many side) while also filtering on product category (1 side). This is not possible in today’s version of SSAS tabular.
Time intelligence
Date/time columns are automatically converted to rich date/time tables starting from the column’s MIN date till the MAX date found
New DAX functions
A lot of new functions that at the moment require quite complex formulas like present time, date difference, percentile, product, geomean, median, etc.
Performance improvements
For end users
Query engine optimized
For developers
Metadata operations; modeling related operations are much faster
For data processing
Parallel partition processing
Expose on-premises tabular models in the cloud (hybrid) à Power BI feature, possible already today with SQL Server 2012.
Analysis Services Dimensional
Netezza as a Data Source (Netezza Data Warehouse | IBM - NDM Technologies)
Performance improvements
Unnatural hierarchies
Distinct counts
Other performance improvements in areas where multidimensional is not performant at the moment
DBCC (DataBase Check Consistency) support. Checks the logical and physical integrity of objects in the specified database.
Expose on-premises multidimensional cubes in the cloud with Power BI (hybrid)
SQL Server Database Engine
Integration of R analytical engine, predictive analytic capabilities via T-SQL queries
PolyBase available without the need of PDW, makes it possible to query both structured relational SQL, and unstructured Hadoop data through T-SQL statements
Data encryption for stored data and data in motion
Row-level security
Updates to the in-memory OLTP engine, for example updateable in-memory nonclustered columnstore indexes
Parsing and storing native JSON data
XEvents-based monitoring in Management Studio
Reporting Services
New look and feel and possibility to apply themes and branding using CSS
New visualizations, chart types like tree maps and sun bursts
Improved flexible parameter panel with support for:
Autocomplete
Search
Hierarchical tree display
Runs in all modern browsers on both desktops as tablets (any device)
Integration of R analytical engine
Power Query as a data source
Pin on-premises SSRS reports to Power BI Dashboards (hybrid)
Integration Services
High Availability support
SSISDB database in AlwaysOn Availability Group. This is already possible with some work arounds.
Power Query integration
Azure Data Factory integration (hybrid)
Execute on-premises SSIS packages from Azure Data Factory
Azure Data Factory data flow task
Azure storage connector
Azure commandlets
OData 4.0 support
Hadoop File System (HDFS) support
JSON support
New Oracle/Teradata connector (4.0)
Incremental deployment options
Custom logging levels
SSIS package templates to reuse ETL code
Mobile BI
In the cloud with Power BI
Power BI App for Windows Phone (coming soon) and iOS
On-premises with Datazen Server
Now available for free for SQL Enterprise Edition customers (2008 or later)
All major platforms: Windows Phone, Android, iOS
Beautiful interface and data visualizations
Optimizable for Phone, Tablet and Laptop
SharePoint vNext integration
Edit Mode of PowerPivot Excel workbooks in browser
Support for Excel vNext (Office 2016) DAX functions
Master Data Services
Improved performance for large models
Row-level compression per entity
Improved user interface
Configurable retention settings
Enhanced security possibilities for read, write, delete and create operations and support for multiple system administrators with specific permissions
Excel Add-in is 15 times faster and is updated to support bulk entity based staging operation
Visual Studio
Database and BI project types merged into one Visual Studio
New scripting language for tabular models. Currently tabular models are wrapped into multidimensional constructs and when you deploy it will be reverse engineered to the tabular model. The new native language for tabular will be easy to understand, modify and deploy.
SSIS designer supports previous versions of SQL Server
Of course there is still also a lot of exiting news coming from the cloud side of Microsoft BI, for example the Azure Data Lake is announced, following the principles of my blogpost about the relational data lake. You can expect a post about the Azure Data Lake on this blog soon!
P.S. Don’t forget to suggest and vote for feature requests for SQL Server yourself at: http://aka.ms/SqlBiUserVoice
