Creating data models with Azure Analysis Services
AAS is a sibling of Power BI that can be provisioned from your Azure portal. Compared to Power BI, AAS doesn't offer the same visualization functionality, however. You would use Power BI or Excel or another tool that can talk DAX or Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) to consume the data model that you can build with AAS.
That is exactly the purpose of AAS: to act as a columnstore database and host a DAX data model just like you would create it with Power BI. AAS will give you a similar set of features and DAX functions when creating a data model that you have seen in this chapter already.
Up to now, the advantage of AAS over Power BI has been the higher amount of data that you could host with AAS. But with the current and further releases of Power BI and the Premium offering, these limits will vanish.
Microsoft has announced that Power BI Premium will be the superset of all the functions of both Power BI and AAS in the...
