Professional SQL Server™ Analysis Services 2005 with MDX

15.2. Creating Local Cubes from Excel

Being busy executives, many consumers of business intelligence information want to be able to access their cubes from the most remote of locations, like from business class aboard a Boeing 747. Yes, some people actually find themselves with a laptop and no Internet connection. Once you stop shivering from the very thought of not being connected to the internet, consider this alternative: you can create what are called local cubes for your customers. With these offline cubes you can distribute an analytic environment to someone sans a network connection. In other words, these customers do not need to have access to an Analysis Services instance to see the data. Local cubes can be created directly by sending the DDL of the database or using Excel. In this chapter you will learn to create local cubes from Excel 2003. Typically, local cubes are small sections of a server cube which are distributed to the end users to analyze the data offline. Customers using local cubes can do almost all of the operations associated with online analysis. However there are some restrictions that you need to be aware of while using local cubes.

The user creating a local cube from a server cube should have the ability to drill-through to the source data so that appropriate data can be retrieved from the server cube to form the local cube. Appropriate permissions to see the source-level data is specified using a role that has specific access permissions to the cubes ...