PowerPivot mode of SSAS installation

SQL Server as well as other Microsoft technologies support BI solutions created by business users. This approach is intended for users who are subject matter experts more than IT experts, who have simple but strong enough tools to create their own analysis and visualizations. The toolset is known as power BI. A part of power BI is the PowerPivot technology--compressed and somehow precalculated data used to build data models similar to data cubes.

For the possibility of sharing our own data models with other users in a well-managed and secured environment, the PowerPivot mode of SSAS was originated. Data models can be deployed with almost no adjustments to the server environment and then can be accessed by authorized users.

One big advantage of PowerPivot mode is that data models are held in memory and when some additional data is needed to fulfill user requests, it can be read from the data source directly.

A detailed description of how Analysis Services work is beyond this book, but combining Analysis Services--no matter which installation mode--with other SQL Server services will lead to big performance problems.