Administrator access to a tabular Analysis Services instance
This blog gives an outline of how to add administrators to an instance of SSAS, and how to set whether some accounts are automatically made administrators by default.

This blog is part of our online SSAS Tabular tutorial; we also offer lots of other Analysis Services training resources.

Posted by Andy Brown on 22 February 2016

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Controlling administrator access to your model

In Analysis Services (tabular model) there are two types of role that you can create:

Type of role Relates to Notes
Admini­strator The Analysis Services instance An Analysis Services instance has to have at least one admini­strator.
Database An individual tabular database You can create roles in either Management Studio or SSDT, controlling who can see which rows in which tables.

This blog gives an overview of how to set the administrator of your Analysis Services instance.

Changing the default administrators

When you install SSAS Tabular, two accounts are automatically made administrators:

Account Property controlling this
Members of the local administrator group on the server on which SSAS is running BuiltIn­AdminsAre­ServerAdmins 
The Windows account on which the Analysis Services service is running ServiceAccount­IsServerAdmin

You can prevent this behaviour by turning off either or both of the properties shown in the table above as follows.  First display your instance's properties:

Database properties

In Management Studio, right-click on an instance of SSAS and choose Properties.

 

Select the General tab:

General security tab

Choose to look at General properties.

 

Now choose to show advanced properties:

Advanced properties

Tick the box shown to reveal advanced properties.

You can now scroll down to change the two properties listed:

The two admin properties

Change either or both of these properties to control who has administrator access to your Analysis Services instance.

 

Adding administrators

You can only change the SSAS administrator in Management Studio (you have to specify at least one administrator when you install Analysis Services):

Server instance properties

Connect to your Analysis Services database, then right-click on it in Management Studio and choose to change its properties.

 

You can now add an administrator as follows:

Adding an administrator

In the Security tab, click on the Add... button to add an administrator to your database.

I don't claim to be a SQL Server security expert, but hopefully this will have helped some overworked SQL Server administrator somewhere!

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