Comparing Tabular and Multidimentional Model in a real BI solution

The increase of amount of accumulated data in organizations have provoked the emergence of new necessities of more complex and efficient analysis tools, context in which the Business Intelligence spring up as a discipline for boarding this problem. The improvement of the efficiency in the storage and access to analytical databases has been reported in many researches, upon which results several companies have introduced commercial products. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 offers two independent options for creating analytical models, the classic multidimensional model and the more recent tabular model. In this paper, a comparative analysis of both models was carried out looking deeply into their features and potentialities. Several important considerations for undertaking a new BI project based on Microsoft platform are suggested. A BI solution that provides particular and integrated visions of the business status of Cimex Co. was developed as real context to perform the comparative analysis. In order to testing the proposed solution and identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each model in different scenarios some experiments were performed.