April 2009
Beginner
448 pages
14h 1m
English
You don’t need Analysis Services as part of your BI system. You could create a BI system with a data warehouse and a couple of reporting applications. Even if you want to have the benefits of OLAP in your BI system, you can choose any of several OLAP vendors. So what makes Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services a good choice? In the first section of this chapter, you learned three major benefits of OLAP technology. Now you will learn how Analysis Services provides those benefits.
Speed comes from storing precalculated values. Querying a 100-million-row table for a grand total is going to take much more time than querying a 100-row summary table. Because most queries can be satisfied ...