Tomorrow January 10th, 2012 at 3pm Eastern Time (which is 8pm GMT) I will deliver a free online session for the PASS DW/BI Virtual Chapter. This is the official description of the session.

Vertipaq vs OLAP: Change Your Data Modeling Approach

While in classical OLAP cubes the clear winner data modeling technique is dimensional modeling, it is interesting to understand what will happen with the new Vertipaq engine. In Vertipaq there is no real need to do dimensional modeling, because the engine is able to manage relational modeling too. In this session we will introduce the new modeling capabilities of Vertipaq, showing how the same scenarios can be modeled in both UDM and Vertipaq. This will lead to an interesting discussion about how to develop your data warehouse in order to make it working with both UDM and Vertipaq.

This is the same session I delivered at PASS Summit 2011, maybe with just some update and fix according to the feedback I received at PASS and new knowledge I’ve got in the last two months.

Thanks to some feedback I received, I’d like to advise you that this session is not a comparison between Vertipaq and OLAP in terms of performance, scalability or features set. The focus of this session is about data modeling, and how you may change the data model on the relational side (and in Tabular, too) in order to leverage the characteristics of the Tabular technology. Just to make an example: in an OLAP model you are used to move part of the calculation in the ETL (snapshot tables, ranking, and so on). Is this still necessary with Vertipaq or not? You might guess the answer, but this and other topics will be the base for the discussion during this session.

Set your agenda and connect to the LiveMeeting session following this link (Tues Jan 10th 3pm Eastern (US) – 8pm GMT)