Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

13.1. Analysis Management Objects (AMO)

As mentioned, AMO is an object model that can be used for programmatic administration of an Analysis Services instance. AMO is the replacement for DSO (Decision Support Objects), which shipped in Analysis Services 2000. It is installed and registered into the GAC (Global Assembly Cache) when Analysis Services is installed. The GAC itself is part of the .NET infrastructure where all commonly used .NET assemblies are registered. Now then, the best way to actually learn AMO is to jump in and use it! In this section you learn a few sample AMO applications that will perform some of the administrative operations you learned to do using SSMS in Chapter 7. With the help of AMO, you can automate almost all your administrative tasks.

13.1.1. Processing Analysis Services Databases

As you learned in Chapter 7, processing is one of the most important operations for an administrator. Usually administrators want to automate this process using scripts or programs. In this section, you learn to build an AMO-based console application that takes four command-line parameters: server name, target type (cube or dimension), processing type (full, incremental, update, or unprocess), and finally, the object's name (to be processed). Before building this console app, please read the following source code in advance and don't worry if you don't get it right away; you will soon learn the purpose of all but the most self-explanatory lines of code. The following code ...