How to Automate SSAS Tabular Model Processing

You are working on a BI project that involves SSAS Tabular model. As you cannot process the model manually you need to develop a solution to process the model automatically. There are two scenarios here:

  1. You have an up and running SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) instance: In this case you can build a SSIS package to process the Tabular Model.
  2. You do not have an SSIS instance ready on the server: So you need to create a SQL Server Agent Job.

In this post I’m expressing easy ways to solve the problem based on the above scenarios.

Using SQL Server Integration Services to Process SSAS Tabular Model

Follow the steps below:

  1. Create a new SSIS project using (SQL Server Data Tools) SSDT
  2. Right click on the “Connection Managers” area and select “New Analysis Services Connection”image

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Deploying SSIS Projects to Different Environments

In this post I’m explaining how you can deploy a developed SSIS project to several different environments. It might have happened to you that there are several environments that you need to deploy the SSIS projects to. Assume that you have DEV, QA, UAT and PROD environments. Some organisations might have even more environments. Also, there are many cases that you might have several PRODs that the SSIS packages should be deployed to all of them. So the scenario is that whenever you create a new SSIS project in DEV area or you may modify the existing projects, you need to deploy each SSIS project to QA for testing purposes. So, if you have 3 new SSIS projects or you’ve just modified 3 existing projects, you’ll need to deploy each project separately. It is the same story for QA guys after finishing the test cases and after the SSIS projects pass all the test cases. They’ll need to deploy all projects to UAT. Again it is the same story with UAT and PROD. It is getting harder when you need to deploy all the projects in several different PROD environments.

Using the solution below, you can easily deploy all SSIS projects from an environment to another environment or even several different environments.

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Operating on different source SQL Server instances in a single SSIS package

In some cases we need to do a single task for lots of SQL Server instances. Assume that we have a web based programme. The programme’s database is distributed across the country and we have 10 different virtual (VM) servers to host the programme’s databases. The programme is working based on some configurations that are stored in a CONFIG database. The CONFIG databases are hosted by 20 different SQL Server instances to serve 20 different clients. The SQL server instances are all named SQL server instances hosted by those 10 virtual servers. We need to update the CONFIG database for all regions on a monthly basis. The database structure of all CONFIG databases is the same. In this case a simple way is to create an SSIS package for each source server to collect the data from all source databases one-by-one. This means that we will have 10 copies of the same SSIS package that each package is pointing to a server as a source server. We need 10 packages because we can retrieve the CONFIG database list by writing a T-SQL script or using an extra Foreach Loop Container. So we need a SSIS package per server.