Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

9.9. Defining Security

Now that you know how to create and enhance a cube to meet your business needs, you also need to know how to provide the right level of access to end users. Many people consider security to be a management task that should be assigned to the administrators. However, your solution might require Analysis Services to perform fine-grain security checks, which can adversely impact calculations. Hence, the cube developer should be actively involved in defining and testing security to verify that users see the right data and experience good query performance.

Analysis Services provides you with fine-grain security settings to control access to metadata and data. You can also grant permissions to certain users who need the ability to process a database, but who do not need full control of the database. You can choose to secure data at the cube level, the dimension level, or even the cell level. Because security is an important topic for you to understand, especially with regard to dimension and cell security, Chapter 22 provides a complete example of a security definition. In this section, you learn the basic steps involved in granting write access permissions to a cube and its dimensions. The following steps will help you better understand how access permissions can be applied to your cubes and dimensions:

1. Right-click the Roles folder in the Solution Explorer of the sample Adventure Works DW 2008 project and choose New Role. BIDS will create a new role called Role. ...