Presenter: Brian Knight
bknight@pragmaticworks.com
Is your customer looking for drag and drop reports or capabilities inside of Excel. SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) is the answer for you then. You’ll be amazed how quickly you can develop sophisticated reports after watching the basics of this session.
SSAS is its own server. It is not part of the SQL Server service.
- IIS
- XMLA between server and client
MDX – SQL Language for Cubes
BIDS – Building the Cubes
SSMS – Managing SSAS
Analysis Services
What are cubes?
- What are measures? (See Erik Veerman Dimensional modeling session)
- The value you are measuring, e.g. the count of users with blue eyes, from WA state, etc.
- The question you are trying to ask
- What are measure groups?
- Groupings of these measures within your cube
- Typically define them by your business problem (e.g. Sales, HR, etc.)
- Cubes are a grouping of measure groups.
Analysis Services Dimensions
What are dimensions and hierarchies? (See Erik Veerman Dimensional modeling session)
- What is a dimension?
- It is what you want to categorize or pivot against
- e.g. How many users are from WA state?
- The dimension is geography, “WA” is the member
- •What is a hierarchy?
- How do you want to organize the members of your dimension
- e.g. Geography has numerous levels such as country, state, and city
- Hierarchy is the organization of those levels such as City ->State ->Country
Concrete examples like these are helpful for my learning and understanding. Thanks!
User Interfaces
- Query language is MDX
- BIDS for developers
- Excel for most users is adequate or Reporting Services
- SharePoint for web users
- 3rdparty applications like Proclarity or Panorama
- Controls you can purchase and build into your own apps
Create User defined hierarchies.
- Remember that in 2008 the hierarchy can be thought of as reversed.
- Looks graphically like date -> month -> qtr -> year
- Means: to get to a date you must go through year, qtr, month, date
Deal with problematic keys.
Most end users will use Excel. 2007 provides additional features.
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