Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

7.2. Online Mode

As an administrator, you need to ensure that databases and their objects are kept up to date. Otherwise, your end users will query out-of-date information. After creating an OLAP database in SSMS you can use the Create Role dialog to create roles and provide permissions to specific users that allow them to be database administrators. To reduce confusion, deployed Analysis Services projects should be named the same as the database created by the server administrator. Once the database is created, the server or the database administrator can perform administrative operations using SSMS such as adding new roles, adding assemblies, or processing objects periodically. There might be certain design changes that you will have to make to the database based on additional requirements from the end users. In such a circumstance you would not be able to make the changes in the original project and deploy that project to the Analysis Services instance because the new objects added to the database will likely be deleted. Analysis Services 2008 provides you two ways to make additional changes. You can connect to the Analysis Services database on the server directly through BIDS and then make the changes in a mode called "online mode." The second option is to import the database into your Analysis Services instance using the Import Analysis Services 2008 Database project (one of the Business Intelligence Project templates that can be used from BIDS), make changes to the database ...