Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX
by Sivakumar Harinath, Matt Carroll, Sethu Meenakshisundaram, Robert Zare, Denny Guang-Yeu Lee
17.4. Summary
As a business intelligence application developer you will likely do your proof-of-concept browsing in BIDS, but in using the cubes you've built for them, your customers will actually do the slicing and dicing in Excel pivot tables or by using Excel Services or Office Web Components technology. In this chapter you learned how Excel 2007 efficiently allows end users to generate effective reports from SSAS either using pivot tables or using the new cube functions in sheet data reports. SQL Server Analysis Services, Excel, and Performance Point Server together make a formidable business intelligence platform and there is no reason not to take advantage of that. Furthermore, there are very few business professionals who don't know Excel; it really is a nearly ubiquitous application. Nonetheless, there are tools from other companies that provide connectivity to and leverage from SQL Server Analysis Services 2008, each with their own value-add proposition. You can obtain more information about other client tools from http://www.ssas-info.com and http://www.mosha.com.
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access