Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

11.2. .NET User-Defined Functions (Stored Procedures)

If you have been programming on the Microsoft platform, you are probably familiar with the .NET Framework and the .NET languages. .NET is Microsoft's framework and strategy to connect people, business, systems, and devices. Several programming languages help in building applications using the framework, which helps in seamless integration with other applications. Analysis Services 2008 couples tightly with UDFs based on .NET languages. In addition to the tight integration, the .NET Framework provides leverage through use of its security model. The model is provided by the framework and gives an additional type of security, code access security, on .NET assemblies added to Analysis Services. In this book we refer to UDFs built using .NET languages as stored procedures and the DLLs they are contained in as .NET assemblies. This section describes how to create, add, query, and debug stored procedures in Analysis Services 2008.

11.2.1. Creating Stored Procedures

.NET stored procedures are the easiest way to extend MDX. You can create .NET stored procedures using any .NET language, such as C# or VB.NET. These stored procedures can be used to perform complex computations catered toward your business applications. A few examples of stored procedures are performing custom business computations that involve business logic based on certain conditions, accessing external resources such as stock price of the company from a web service ...