Cube vs. VertiPaq Query Performance

This is a big topic and frankly it's too ambitious on my part to tackle it. Assuming equivalent multidimensional (BISM Multidimensional) and tabular (BISM Tabular) models, I was curious how a multidimensional cube fares against VertiPaq in terms of performance. To be fair to VertiPaq, I decided to use native DAX queries. As you've probably heard, BISM Tabular in SQL Denali will include a variant of DAX to query tabular models deployed to SharePoint and SSAS running in VertiPaq mode. Chris Webb has a good writeup about DAX queries here. The DAX EVALUATE construct allows external clients to query tabular models using native DAX syntax instead of MDX. Since BISM Tabular speaks DAX, DAX queries are likely to be more efficient and give you better performance when querying tabular models. At this point, only Crescent generates native DAX queries. The DAX query syntax is:

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