SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence

Module 9: PowerPivot

Overview

PowerPivot For Excel

PowerPivot For SharePoint

Lesson: PowerPivot For Excel

PowerPivot Introduction

PowerPivot and Excel

PowerPivot Features

PowerPivot Functions

VertiPaq Engine

Where are my rows?

SQL Azure

CodePlex Projects

PowerPivot versus SSAS

PowerPivot Introduction

Microsoft's PowerPivot for Excel 2010 is a data analysis tool for business users that delivers unmatched computational power directly within Excel 2010

Why Excel?

Excel is an easy and known tool to all business usersWhy PowerPivot?

Creating and Building Cubes with Analysis Services is complex and over kill for many organizations

NOTE: PowerPivot creation and modification works in Excel 2010 only!

Requires Enterprise SKU of SharePoint

PowerPivot & Excel

PowerPivot extends Excel

Excel is the most popular tool for business users Allows users to manage data and make decisions (If IT

can’t provide the tools, Excel is used) There are both 32bit and 64bit versions, must match your

installed Office 2010 versionPowerPivot improves Excel and End users by

Increasing efficiencies Powerful toolset of functions

Power Pivot Features

Data Analysis Expressions (DAX)

Express BI logic based on Excel formula syntax with added functionality Calculated Columns (cleanse and extend) PivotTable Measures (advanced analysis)

Tools for working with Data Sources

Table Import Wizard (html tables, other tabular data) Join disparate data into composite data sources (local text file with remote

database, two separate data warehouses) Data Feeds (SharePoint 2010 REST, ATOM) You can also copy and paste into the current in-memory data!

Data/Column-based compression

Load large data sets into memory and process in secondsBring Slicing and Dicing to Excel

Use to only exist in tools like Analysis Services (OLAP) when using large datasets

PowerPivot DAX Functions

PowerPivot has many different categories of functions:

Date and Time (EOMonth, Weekday) Filter and Value (Calculate, All) Logical (true, false) Math and Trig Statistical (CountRows, SumX) Text Time Intelligence (StartOfMonth, EndOfMonth) Information (IsError)

VertiPaq Engine

Wait, you can load “millions” of rows in Excel? What?

Yep, using the VertiPaq engine, you can download and compress millions of rows of data into Excel

What is VertiPaq?

An SSAS implementationAMO and ADOMD.NET are used to interface with VertiPaq

Means that traditional MDX and XMLA can be used to query the multidimensional data generated

Everything runs in-proc to Excel (best performance on 64bit client)

If one crashes, all crashes Limited to the memory of the machine

Most data you are crunching should have been already pre-processed at some level

Alleviate some of the work from the client machine

Where are my rows?

When you pull down 100’s of millions of rows where does the data go?

Answer: MemoryIn-Memory BI (IMBI) is a database storage technique used by PowerPivot

Common pattern used in large scale transaction systems Allows for no-disk I/O, quick data scans and compression of data Column striping versus Row striping

When saving the data, it goes into the workbook (zip file)

\customXml\item1.data For caching purposes, some resides in the %temp%\VertiPaq_<GUID>

folder before saveNote: SharePoint has a 2GB File limit, variable compression ratio means what runs in PowerPivot might not save in SharePoint!

Depending on your dataset, your compression will vary (15x), the more data, the better the compression

SQL Azure Support

One of the data sources supported with PowerPivot is SQL Azure

SQL Azure is a database server in the cloud

Just a simple SQL Server hosted somewhere else that will have (at some point) guaranteed uptime and performance features

As of today, the following is not supported in the Cloud

Analysis Services Reporting Services Replication Service Broker

Avoiding PowerPivot PowerPitfalls

PowerPivot is no doubt easy and powerful, however, be sure to Plan!

Training your PowerPivot usersDAX, Best Practices (single workbook vs multiple)

Cooperation between business units and ITPlan for power user access to data (data feeds) and support

Planning your PowerPivot for SharePoint deployment(s)Dept, Enterprise

PowerPivot requires Office 2010You have to plan another rollout of Office

You still need highly experienced BI Consultants!

PowerPivot Resources

Several helpful resources for PowerPivot exist

PowerPivotpro.com PowerPivotTwins.com

CodePlex has a PowerPivot Sample Data project

http://powerpivotsampledata.codeplex.com Data rich access databases that you can “play” with

Lesson: PowerPivot For SharePoint

Traditional Excel Issues

Why Excel And SharePoint?

Features

Management

Traditional Excel Problems

Emailing the data

Leaves the company, can cause Inbox problems (160MB reports)

Ensuring correct versions are published to recipients

Keeping the report up to date (changing data and requirements)

Report author is out for a week the report is due, what happens?

Why Excel and SharePoint?

Share and Collaborate

Put in document library, not in emailPublish your Excel reports to SharePoint

In place, scheduled data refreshesManage security with SharePoint

If they don’t have at least view permission, they will never know it exists!

PowerPivot, Excel and SharePoint, Oh My!

Combining all three technologies presents giant leap forward in the world of Business Intelligence

SharePoint provides the Security and Management Excel provides the simple and easy user interface PowerPivot provides the data analytics engine

PowerPivot for SharePoint Features

Tight integration with SharePoint through Solutions and Features

PowerPivot Gallery – Rich preview features View Only Permissions allow interaction without modification Set of custom actions added to Central Administration for

managementUnattended Data Refresh

PowerPivot data sources can be refreshed based on your custom schedule

Highly informative charts and reports provide information on usage

Utilize built in reports to track usage Discover mission-critical applications

PowerPivot for SharePoint Installation

Install is done through the SQL Server 2008 R2 installer package

Installer can create a new SharePoint Farm or add support for an existing Farm

Installation is MUCH simpler using the SQL Installer to create a NEW farm

PP4S requires a VertiPaq Analysis Services database instance

If you have installed the full Analysis Services you will need to create another instance that is in VertiPaq mode

ASOMD.NET 10.50.xxxx

PowerPivot for SharePoint Components

Components include:

SharePoint Service SharePoint Service Application Solutions and Features

Dashboards, web parts, content types and list templates (PowerPivot Gallery and Data Feed Library)

Application Database for configuration, schedule information for data refresh

Timer JobsRemoves cached data files on the servers if workbooks are deleted or modified

PowerPivot Web Service and managed extensionHandles requests between clients and PowerPivot for SharePoint

PowerPivot and Reporting Services

Exciting things happen when both are installed together

A report can be used as a data source in PowerPivot New reports can be created from PowerPivot workbooks

Requires SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services

Programmatic Interfaces

AMO

Analysis management objects allows you to query the properties and structures of PowerPivot workbook in the farm

You can query, but you cannot create or modify AS objects. Only Excel 2010 can be used to modify PowerPivot workbooks

Data Storage Requirements

PowerPivot workbooks will be stored in SharePoint

Workbooks contain their data (remember our compression ratio)? These workbooks can get very large

SharePoint officially can only hold 2GB files (even with RBS)

Versioning enabled on a PowerPivot document library could pose significant storage issues

Server versus Client Processing

SharePoint 2010 is 64bit

PowerPivot workbooks that are created in a 64bit environment with a correspondingly high amount of memory will work great on a similar environments

Clients are not a server

Clients that try to tackle a workbook that has lots of data may not be successful (lack memory and processor capabilities of a server)

Evaluate the client infrastructure and ensure all users can take advantage of your PowerPivot workbooks

If working with more than 1 Million rows, you should be 64bit client

PowerPivot Monitoring

Server Status

CPU and Memory Utilization System Capacity and Performance Workbook and User Activity over Time

Quality of Service

Query Response Times Current Server State Largest and Most Popular Solutions

Solution Statistics and Monitoring

Document Information and Data Sources Activity and Top Users Query Performance per Workbook

Lab 1: Power Pivot

Install PowerPivot for Excel

Install PowerPivot for SharePoint 2010

Lab 2: Use Power Pivot

Create PowerPivot Workbooks

Configure PowerPivot for SharePoint

Upload PowerPivot Workbooks to SharePoint

Review

Your instructor will ask a series of questions on this module

Summary

PowerPivot is a powerful extension to Excel

Various new functions and tools give Excel true BI capabilities