Professional SQL Server™ Analysis Services 2005 with MDX

10.3. .NET User Defined Functions (Stored Procedures)

If you have been programming on the Microsoft platform, you must be familiar with the .NET framework and the .NET languages. .NET (Dot Net) is Microsoft's framework and strategy to connect people, business, systems, and devices. Several programming languages help in building applications using the framework, which helps in seamless integration with other applications. Analysis Services 2005 couples tightly with UDFs based on .NET languages. In addition to the tight integration, the .NET framework provides leverage through use of its security model. The model is provided by the framework and can be used to support fine-grain security on .NET assemblies added to Analysis Services. We refer to UDFs built using .NET languages as .NET assemblies as well as stored procedures in this book.

10.3.1. Creating Stored Procedures

You can create a .NET assembly using any of the .NET languages, such as C# or VB.Net. Similar to COM UDFs you can create your stored procedures to perform complex business computations catered towards your business applications. A few examples of stored procedures would be to perform custom business computations that will involve business logic based on certain conditions, accessing external resources such as stock price of the company from a web service to perform calculations, and accessing external resources such as data from a SQL Server to apply permissions on Analysis Services. Chapter 19 shows an example ...