Introduction

When developing a tabular model, you have two primary choices for where and how the data is stored and accessed from end user tools. Tabular models are unlike SQL Server Analysis Services Multidimensional models, which only store all data to disk. Tabular models by default store data in memory with an option for storing data to disk when appropriate. By storing the data in memory there is faster query performance since there is no disk I/O for retrieving data results. Modeling can be accomplished in visual studio and does not require a full data transformation or load process which speeds up the time to develop and deploy the model to production. This chapter focuses on the available storage modes for tabular models, in-memory mode and DirectQuery mode. You will learn how each mode operates and best practices for choosing the appropriate mode for your solution.

Understanding query modes

There are two unique values that you can choose to implement the query mode in your model....