MDX Solutions: With Microsoft® SQL Server™ Analysis Services 2005 and Hyperion® Essbase, Second Edition

Chapter 8. Using the Attribute Data Model of Microsoft Analysis Services

So far you have learned the MDX language and the various ways of creating and applying calculations to solve common business problems. MDX was first introduced by Microsoft along with SQL Server Analysis Services 7.0 in 1998. Since its introduction several OLAP providers such as Hyperion Essbase and SAP have started supporting MDX. Microsoft's Analysis Services 2005 supports the MDX per the OLE DB for OLAP specification, along with its own extensions to enrich the data retrieval from the multidimensional database within Analysis Services 2005.

Analysis Services 2005 combines the power of OLAP with a fair amount of flexibility of relational reporting, providing a unified model to the end users. In this chapter, you will first learn how Analysis Services 2005 is able to provide you the functionality of relational and OLAP databaseswith the help of Unified Dimensional Model (UDM). We will discuss how a multidimensional database is modeled using the dimensions and cubes within Analysis Services. The calculation model of Analysis Services 2005 is primarily based on attributes, which are entities that are part of the dimensions, and the relationships between the attributes. Analysis Services 2005 introduces MDX scripts, an entity that holds all the calculations that are to be applied to a cube. You will be introduced to the attribute-based calculation model, and MDX scripts in this chapter. You will learn properties ...