Professional SQL Server™ Analysis Services 2005 with MDX

1.5. Analysis Services 2005

Analysis Services 2005 is part of Microsoft's product SQL Server 2005. SQL Server 2005 is the latest SQL Server release from Microsoft in November of 2005. In addition to Analysis Services 2005, SQL Server 2005 contains other services such as Integrations Services, Reporting Services, and Notification Services among other things. Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services together form the core of business intelligence platform with SQL Server as the backend. Analysis Services 2005 not only provides you 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. Analysis Services is part of a greater Business Intelligence platform, which leverages not only the rest of SQL Server 2005, but the .NET Framework (Common Language Runtime) and Visual Studio development environment as well. Next you will learn about the overall architecture of Analysis Services 2005 followed by the concept of Unified Dimensional Model (UDM) which helps you to have a unified view of your entire data warehouse.

SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 has been re-architected as both scalable and reliable enterprise class software that provides fine-grain security. So, not only is it quite manageable; but also protects your data from malicious attacks. The architecture of Analysis Services 2005 provides efficient scalability in terms of scale-out ...