Checking you have Analysis Services Tabular running

You can check what SSAS services you have running using either or both of SQL Server Configuration Manager and SQL Server Management Studio.

Checking using Configuration Manager

You can use SQL Server Configuration Manager (among other tools) to check you have an instance of SQL Server Analysis Services (tabular model) running:

Choose this option to run SQL Server Configuration Manager.

You can now see if you have an instance of Analysis Services running:

Not only is this instance of SSAS running (which is good news), but it's set to start automatically when you turn on your computer.

Of course, this could be running in multi-dimensional mode, so you now need to check this in Management Studio!

Using SSMS to check the type of Analysis Server instance running

You can now run Management Studio to check on your SSAS instance:

If you don't know how to run Management Studio, you probably shouldn't be reading this blog!

You can now choose to connect to Analysis Services:

Choose to connect to your Analysis Services database.

If the icon next to your server looks like this, you're using tabular SSAS:

The icon for a tabular database looks like this.

Compare this with the other possible icons (taken from this StackOverflow article):

The icons for multi-dimensional, tabular and PowerPivot modes respectively.

OK - things are looking good, so let's now use Visual Studio and customise its settings.