Microsoft Business Analytics combines Business Intelligence with Data Warehousing and Big Data Analytics. This 1-hour 20-minute video by Rafal Lukawiecki introduces this concept by showing you how real-world analytics, created by a power user in Excel 2013, can be shared with others in a company, using SharePoint Server 2013, and subsequently scaled-up to the needs of an enterprise, by means of a SQL Server 2012 SP1 Analysis Services Tabular Model. Rafal covers the entire subject broadly, showing you some of the new Excel 2013 BI features, such as Quick Explore and the Timeline, and by switching between the technologies as necessary, in an extensive, 9-part, 55-minute, high-def demo, which forms the core of this video tutorial.

Since good BI is essential to business analytics, you should help your users by focusing it on the correct information, filtering out data that is not applicable to the user’s context, and by simplifying the presentation of the information in an attractive format. The new technologies available in Excel 2013, such as Power View, Data Model, and PowerPivot, make it possible to present complex analytics in attractive formats, easily. You will see how to present data on an interactive, user-zoomable Bing map of the world without even having to know the actual longitudes and latitudes of your data points, since Power View is capable of automatically geocoding your data from a name of a city, region, country, or a continent, by querying Bing on your behalf. Best of all, aggregations are automatically calculated at all the required levels of a geographical hierarchy.

There are two ways to share analytical workbooks, created in Excel 2013, with others in your organisation. The easiest, but not necessarily the most manageable way, is to simply upload an Excel 2013 workbook to your SharePoint 2013 server, which must be running SQL Server 2012 SP1 (or later) Analysis Services (SSAS) in SharePoint Integrated Mode (aka the PowerPivot mode). SharePoint 2013 is able to render Power View contained in an uploaded workbook as long as you use the Excel Services component, rather than the Excel Web App.

In order to secure a workbook by defining roles which specify which rows of data should be visible to certain users, or to partition it for better update performance, or to take advantage of ability to work with more than 2 billion rows of data, you need to convert your Excel data model to a tabular model residing on SSAS. This is much easier to do than it sounds: simply create a new Tabular Project using SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT), indicating that you wish to import a PowerPivot-containing (that is Excel 2013 Data Model or an Excel 2010 with PowerPivot) workbook, or use SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to restore from a workbook. You can see this process in the demo, showing you a realistic, 1 GB data model, containing some 32 million rows.

Once you have a tabular model on an SSAS server, using it is very easy. You can create a BI Semantic Model Connection File (BISM Connection File) in SharePoint for your users. You will see how to create a zoomable geospatial map report, and an animated bubble chart (scatter plot) in the demo, showing you how those attractive visualisations can be used to analyse data by means of simple clustering, and how to export it to PowerPoint and use it as static or fully interactive slides in a presentation, or use as a dashboard, created using the Page Viewer SharePoint web part.

Rafal summarises this tutorial by briefly discussing the underlying in-memory technologies: xVelocity for In-Memory Analytics Engine, and the upcoming “Hekaton” for transactional, in-memory processing. You will also hear a few comments about the use of data of any size, including the fashionably-termed Big Data for your analytics, by means of Microsoft HDInsight technology which implements the Apache Hadoop distributed processing system, although this will be covered in another module in more detail.

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