Professional SQL Server™ Analysis Services 2005 with MDX

19.2. Securing Your Dimension Data

Often in business you have to restrict data access from certain sets of users. You might have to restrict whole members of a dimension or just cell values. Restricting access to members of a dimension to users is called dimension security. Restricting access to cell values from users is called cell security. You learn more about securing dimension members in this section, followed by restricting access to cell values in the following section with the help of a business scenario.

Dimension security helps you to restrict access to members of a dimension for your Analysis Services database users based on your business needs. For example, you can have a dimension account that could have members such as accounts payable, accounts receivable, and materials inventory for your company. You might want to restrict user access such that certain users can see only the account types that they are authorized to work with. For example, the personnel working in the accounts payable department should only be able to see the members under accounts payable and should not be able to see all the accounts under accounts receivable or materials inventory. Here is another example: If your company is selling products in various cities, you might want to restrict access to sales employees so that they can only see the data for which they are responsible on a city-by-city basis.

Analysis Services provides security restrictions on objects using an object called "role" as ...