SQLBits 2020

Analysis Services DevOps with Tabular Editor

Continuous Integration and Delivery can be a pickle for Analysis Services Tabular Models when using the standard tools. With Azure DevOps, GIT and Tabular Editor, there's a better way...

This is an updated version of my SQLBits 2019 session with the same name.

Every Business Intelligence team should aspire to fully automate the build, test and deployment of their BI solution. Traditionally, this was not an easy thing to do - especially considering the state of the standard tooling for much of the Microsoft BI stack. Thanks to Tabular Editor, however, we now have a tool that makes proper DevOps much easier - at least for Analysis Services Tabular.

In this session, we will demonstrate an end-to-end Azure BI solution with a Tabular Model on top, which is continuously built, tested and deployed using GIT and Azure DevOps. The secret sauce is Tabular Editor's Command-line Interface, which allow us to make validation deployments, run a Best Practice analysis and deploy directly from within an Azure DevOps pipeline. Furthermore, thanks to Tabular Editor's folder serialisation, merge conflicts are a thing of the past - even when multiple developers work simultaneously on the same model!