HomePower PivotSQL Server 2012: Tabular Models vs PowerPivot Models

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SQL Server 2012: Tabular Models vs PowerPivot Models — 4 Comments

  1. In the section on scalability, reference is made to the 2 GB file size limitation. Is this not only applicable to 32-bit installations? My understanding is that the maximum file size limitation is gone if you are using 64-bit Excel and that the workbook size is then limited only by the availability of disk and memory resources on your computer

    • Hi Linda,

      Sorry for the confusion: The 32 Bit version can only address 2GB of memory which effectively limits the size of the PowerPivot workbook to about 500-700Mb. The 64 bit version used to be limited to 4Gb file size in Excel 2010 but in Excel 2013 that limitation has been removed which means that the size of the workbook is no longer limited by the software but rather by the physical configuration of one’s machine.

  2. Hi,
    Thanks for this. May be another addition to the list is that the tabular model allows users to have more friendly names for entities and attributes which uplifts self-service for end users. Powerpivot and others would also allow but that’s not potentially the purpose of powerpivot. Please correct me if I am wrong.
    Regards, Venkatesh

  3. Hi James, Thanks for the post. Question to you: I am involved in reading data from a Tabular data model (that I created using PowerPivot for Excel in Excel 2013 – let’s call this datamodel spreadsheet – and uploaded to SSAS Tabular using the Restore from PowerPivot feature in SSAS) by connecting to it using Excel 2013 – let’s call this report spreadsheet -“and it works fine.

    Now I need to be able host and open the report spreadsheet using SharePoint within a browser. For this we installed SSAS\PowerPivot running in SharePoint mode and configrued the Excel Services in SharePoint to connect to it. Now when I open the report spreadsheet from a SharePoint library, yes, it displays static data (which is some data that I stored when I safed the spreadsheet earlier) since there is no data in SSAS\PowerPivot yet. The option to restore from powerpivot is disabled for SSAS running in SharePoint mode.

    My DBA thinks installing the spPowerPivot.msi (ie PowerPivot for SharePoint 2013 add-in) in SharePoint should allow me to store the power pivot data model into SSAS\PowerPivot using the datamodel spreadsheet. I am thinking that even before I do this, I am going to try and open the datamodel spreadsheet from within SharePoint and see if saving it will actually create the cube on the SSAS\PowerPivot. I got this idea when I read the line in your post that says “Excel Service in Share Point create a cube behind the scenes”.

    Any thoughts?

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