Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

1.6. SQL Server Analysis Services 2008

SQL Server 2008 is the Microsoft business intelligence platform. Analysis Services 2008 is the multidimensional database engine. In addition to Analysis Services, SQL Server 2008 contains other services such as Integration Services (tools and engine to Extract, Transform, and Load) and Reporting Services, among other things. Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services together form the core of the business intelligence platform with SQL Server as the backend. Analysis Services not only provides you with the ability to build dimensions and cubes for data analysis but also supports several data mining algorithms, which can provide business insight into your data that are not intuitive. Next you learn about the overall architecture of Analysis Services 2008 followed by the concept of the Unified Dimensional Model (UDM), which helps you to have a unified view of your entire data warehouse.

SSAS 2008 is a scalable, reliable, and secure enterprise class multidimensional database server. The architecture of Analysis Services allows it to provide scalability in terms of scale-out and scale-up features and in terms of very large database capabilities. Several instances of Analysis Services can be integrated together to provide an efficient scale-out solution. Similarly, Analysis Services is also 64-bit enabled and scales-up on a large-scale system. On the other hand, the service has been architected with efficient algorithms to ...