Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

13.5. Summary

If you have never created programs to dynamically administer a server, perhaps you found this to be one of the most exciting chapters yet! It is great how you can apply the power and flexibility of programming with direct access to server-side functionality. You've seen how to use the Analysis Management Objects (AMO) object model to perform management tasks as well as to update the definition of Analysis Services databases. AMO provides you the power to program custom UIs and gain full access to the capabilities of the server. More important, AMO allows you to automate common tasks, such as processing, adding new users, or even the management of partitions. You've seen how .NET languages such as C# can be used to work with AMO, as well as how PowerShell can be used to work more interactively or to script AMO.

You've also learned how to perform some advanced administration tasks not available directly through the SQL Server Management Studio user interface. You've learned to monitor the resources and activities of a server using schema rowsets. You've seen how Analysis Services 2008 has extended the schema rowset support to provide much more transparency into the status of the server and how these rowsets can now be easily queried using SQL. You've learned how Analysis Services can be configured to support connections over HTTP and also how a fail-over cluster can be used to provide improved reliability without any visible difference to the end user.

The next chapter ...