Microsoft has announced a new cloud service in preview – SQL Server Analysis Services. This has been a glaring gap in the cloud stack for years and while you could deploy databases through Azure SQL and/or Azure Data Warehouse, you could not deploy SSAS cubes. If you wanted to deploy cubes to the cloud, the only approach supported was to spin up a SQL Server as IAAS and pay the full on premise licenses to run it.
The new SSAS service supports data sources from both cloud and on premise including SQL Server, Oracle, SharePoint and HD Insight.
The new SQL Server Analysis Services only supports tabular models – multi-dimensional cubes are not supported currently. Pricing also has not been provided yet.
