Professional Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2008 with MDX pdf

What you will learn from this book ● The basic concepts of using Analysis Services and the common operations you need to design your databases ● How to create multi-dimensional databases

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Database Management General

ISBN: 978-0-470-24798-3

The new features of Analysis Services 2008 make it even easier to use and

build your databases for efficient and improved performance This authoritative

book, written by key members of the Analysis Services product team at

Microsoft, explains how to best use these enhancements for your business

needs The authors provides you with valuable insight on how to use Analysis

Services 2008 effectively to build, process, and deploy top-of-the-line

business intelligence applications

You’ll explore everything that Analysis Services 2008 has to offer and examine

the important features of this product with the help of step-by-step instructions

on building multi-dimensional databases Within each chapter, you will not only

learn how to use the features, but you’ll also discover more about the features

at a user level and what happens behind the scenes to make things work

You’ll get a look at how features really operate, enabling you to understand

how to use them to their full potential Plus, you’ll sharpen your ability to debug

problems that you might not have been able to otherwise

What you will learn from this book

● The basic concepts of using Analysis Services and the common operations

you need to design your databases

● How to create multi-dimensional databases (such as multiple measure

groups, business intelligence wizards, key performance indicators, and

more)

● Methods for extending MDX via external functions

● Ways to administer your Analysis Services programmatically and design and

optimize your cube for best performance

● How data mining along with Microsoft Office 2007 makes it easy to use

and effective to perform analysis on data

Enhance Your Knowledge Advance Your Career

Who this book is for

This book is for database and data warehouse developers and administrators interested in exploiting the power of business

intelligence and leveraging the SQL Server 2008 tool set

Professional Microsoft®

Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

Enhance Your Knowledge Advance Your Career

Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services

978-0-470-24795-2This book shows developers how to master the 2008 release of SSIS, covering topics including data warehousing with SSIS, new methods of managing the SSIS platform, and improved techniques for ETL operations

Professional SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services

978-0-470-24201-8This book teaches solutions architects, designers, and developers how to use Microsoft’s reporting platform to create reporting and business intelligence solutions

Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services

978-0-470-24798-3

Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services shows readers how to

build data warehouses and multidimensional databases, query databases, and use Analysis Services and other components of SQL Server to provide end-to-end solutions

Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Programming

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Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Administration

978-0-470-24796-9

A how-to guide for experienced database administrators, this book is loaded with unique tips, tricks, and workarounds for handling the most difficult SQL Server administration issues The authors discuss data capture, performance studio, Query Governor, and new techniques for monitoring and policy management

Beginning Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Programming

978-0-470-25701-2This comprehensive introduction to SQL Server covers the fundamentals and moves on to discuss how to create and change tables, manage keys, write scripts, work with stored procedures, and much more

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Beginning T-SQL with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and 2008 provides a comprehensive introduction to the T-SQL programming language, with

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978-0-470-38549-4

Beginning Database Design Solutions introduces IT professionals—both DBAs and database developers—to database design It explains what

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Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

Introduction xxix

Part I: Introduction Chapter 1: Introduction to Data Warehousing and SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services 3

Chapter 2: First Look at Analysis Services 2008 23

Chapter 3: Introduction to MDX 67

Chapter 4: Working with Data Sources and Data Source Views 93

Chapter 5: Dimension Design 117

Chapter 6: Cube Design 161

Chapter 7: Administering Analysis Services 197

Part II: Advanced Topics Chapter 8: Advanced Dimension Design 245

Chapter 9: Advanced Cube Design 285

Chapter 10: Advanced Topics in MDX 367

Chapter 11: Extending MDX Using External Functions 395

Chapter 12: Data Writeback 413

Part III: Advanced Administration and Performance Optimization Chapter 13: Programmatic and Advanced Administration 441

Chapter 14: Designing for Performance 457

Chapter 15: Analyzing and Optimizing Query Performance 517

Part IV: Integration with Microsoft Products Chapter 16: Data Mining 553

Chapter 17: Analyzing Cubes Using Microsoft Office Components 601

Chapter 18: Using Data Mining with Office 2007 677

Continues

Part V: Scenarios

Chapter 21: Designing Real-Time Cubes 833

Chapter 22: Securing Your Data in Analysis Services 855

Chapter 23: Inventory Scenarios 897

Chapter 24: Financial Scenarios 923

Chapter 25: Web Analytics 951

Appendix A: MDX Functions 991

Index 993

Microsoft ® SQL Server ®

Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

Microsof t ® SQL Server ®

Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

Sivakumar Harinath Matt Carroll Sethu Meenakshisundaram

Robert Zare Denny Guang-Yeu Lee

Wiley Publishing, Inc.

Copyright © 2009 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN: 978-0-470-24798-3

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who has been fully supportive and patient with me for all the late nights I worked on this book

It is also dedicated to my twins, Praveen and Divya, who have seen me work long hours on this book

I dedicate this book in memory of my father, Harinath Govindarajalu, who passed away in 1999 and who I am sure would have been proud of this great achievement, and to my mother, Sundar Bai, and my sister, Geetha Harinath Finally, I dedicate this book in memory of my uncle, Jayakrishnan Govindarajalu, who passed away in 2007 and who was very proud of me co - authoring the first edition of this book,

and was eagerly looking forward to seeing this book

— Siva Harinath

Thanks to my wife, Wendy, for her love and patience Love and hope to Lawrence,

Loralei, and Joshua

— Matt Carroll

To my Parents, Uncle & Aunt, Guru(s), and the Lord Almighty for molding

me into who I am today

— Sethu Meenakshisundaram

To the patience and love from Isabella and Hua - Ping

— Denny Lee

Sivakumar Harinath was born in Chennai, India Siva has a Ph.D in Computer Science from the

University of Illinois at Chicago His thesis title was “ Data Management Support for Distributed Data Mining of Large Datasets over High Speed Wide Area Networks ” Siva has worked for Newgen Software Technologies (P) Ltd., IBM Toronto Labs, Canada; National Center for Data Mining, University of Illinois

at Chicago; and has been at Microsoft since February of 2002 Siva started as a Software Design Engineer

in Test (SDET) in the Analysis Services Performance Team and currently is a Senior Test Lead in the Analysis Services team Siva ’ s other interests include high - performance computing, distributed systems, and high - speed networking Siva is married to Shreepriya and has twins, Praveen and Divya His personal interests include travel, games, and sports (in particular carrom, chess, racquet ball, and board games) You can reach Siva at Sivakumar.harinath@microsoft.com

Matt Carroll is currently a Senior Development Lead on the SQL Server Integration Services team at

Microsoft Prior to this, he spent 10 years working on the SQL Server Analysis Services team as a developer and then development lead He ’ s presented on Analysis Services at VSLive and compiled and edited the whitepaper “ OLAP Design Best Practices for Analysis Services 2005 ”

Sethu Meenakshisundaram has more than 20 years of Enterprise System Software Development

experience Sethu spent a good portion of his career at Sybase Inc in architecture, development, and management building world class OLTP and OLAP Database Systems Sethu was instrumental in developing and leading highly complex clustered systems of Adaptive Server Enterprise Early in the ‘ 90s, Sethu developed a version of Sybase Adaptive Server running on the Windows platform Most recently he was an Architect in the SQL Server BI team driving technology and partner strategy Prior to Microsoft, Sethu managed all of Server development as Senior Director at Sybase including building teams in the U.S., India, and China He is currently a Vice President in charge of Technology Strategy at SAP Labs, USA

Rob Zare is a program manager on the SQL Server development team He ’ s worked on the product since

shortly before the first service pack of SQL Server 2000 During that time, he ’ s focused primarily on Analysis Services, though for the next major release of SQL Server he ’ ll be focused on Integration

Services He is the co - author of Fast Track to MDX and regularly speaks at major technical conferences

around the world

Denny Lee is a Senior Program Manager based out of Redmond, WA in the SQLCAT Best Practices Team

He has more than 12 years experience as a developer and consultant implementing software solutions to complex OLTP and data warehousing problems His industry experience includes accounting, human resources, automotive, retail, web analytics, telecommunications, and healthcare He had helped create the first OLAP Services reporting application in production at Microsoft and is a co - author of “ SQL Server

2000 Data Warehousing with Analysis Services ” and “ Transforming Healthcare through Information [Ed Joan Ash] (2008) ” In addition to contributing to the SQLCAT Blog, SQL Server Best Practices, and SQLCAT.com, you can also review Denny ’ s Space (http://denster.spaces.live.com) Denny specializes in developing solutions for Enterprise Data Warehousing, Analysis Services, and Data Mining;

he also has focuses in the areas of Privacy and Healthcare

Wow!!! It has been an amazing 15 months from when we decided to partner in writing this book The first edition of this book started when Siva jokingly mentioned to his wife the idea of writing a book on SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 She took it seriously and motivated him to start working on the idea

in October 2003 Because the first edition was well received, Siva identified co-authors for the new edition All the co-authors of this book were part of the SQL Server team when they started writing this book As always, there are so many people who deserve mentioning that we are afraid we will miss someone If you are among those missed, please accept our humblest apologies We first need to thank the managers of each co-author and Kamal Hathi, Product Unit Manager of the Analysis Services team for permission to moonlight Siva specifically thanks his manager Lon Fisher for his constant

encouragement and support to help Analysis Services customers We thank our editors, Bob Elliott and Kelly Talbot, who supported us right from the beginning but also prodded us along, which was necessary to make sure the book was published on time

We would like to thank our technical reviewers, Ron Pihlgren and Prashant Dhingra, who graciously offered us their assistance and significantly helped in improving the content and samples in the book

We thank Akshai Mirchandani, Wayne Robertson, Leah Etienne, and Grant Paisley for their contributions in the book for Chapters 5, 6, 14, 17, and 18 We thank all our colleagues in the Analysis Services product team (including Developers, Program Managers, and Testers) who helped us in accomplishing the immense feat of writing the book on a development product To the Analysis Services team, special thanks go to Akshai Mirchandani, T K Anand, Cristian Petculescu, Bogdan Crivat, Dana Cristofor, Marius Dumitru, Andrew Garbuzov, Bo Simmons, and Richard Tkachuk from the SQL Server Customer Advisory team for patiently answering our questions or providing feedback to enhance the content of the book

Most importantly, we owe our deepest thanks to our wonderful families Without their support and sacrifice, this book would have become one of those many projects that begins and never finishes Our families were the ones who truly took the brunt of it and sacrificed shared leisure time, all in support of our literary pursuit We especially want to thank them for their patience with us, and the grace it took to not kill us during some of the longer work binges

Inmon Versus Kimball — Different Approaches 13 Business Intelligence Is Data Analysis 13 Microsoft Business Intelligence Capabilities 14

Differences between Analysis Services 2000, Analysis Services 2005,

Upgrading to Analysis Services 2008 26

Using Business Intelligence Development Studio 35

Creating an Analysis Services Database Using Business Intelligence Development Studio 38

Using SQL Server Management Studio 59

Querying Using the MDX Query Editor 63

Chapter 4: Working with Data Sources and Data Source Views 93

Multiple Data Sources within a DSV 114 Summary 115

Working with the Dimension Wizard 117 Working with the Dimension Designer 124

Defining Translations in Dimensions 148 Creating a Snowflake Dimension 150

Creating a Parent-Child Hierarchy 156 Summary 160

The Unified Dimensional Model 161 Creating a Cube Using the Cube Wizard 163

Measures and Measure Groups 180

Creating Perspectives 192

Browsing Perspectives and Translations 194

Summary 196

Administration Using SQL Server 2008 Tools 197

Synchronization 233

Summary 242

Part II: Advanced Topics

Enhancements to Parent-Child Hierarchies 255

Using Properties to Customize Dimensions 261

Chapter 9: Advanced Cube Design 285

Measure Groups and Measures 286 Adding and Enhancing Dimensions 291

Restricting Cube Space/Slicing Cube Data 383

Using EXISTING 385

.NET User-Defined Functions (Stored Procedures) 397

COM UDFs versus NET Stored Procedures 410

Summary 411

Update a Single Cell Value 430

Summary 437

Part III: Advanced Administration and Performance

Optimization

Analysis Management Objects (AMO) 441

Resource and Activity Monitoring 450 HTTP Connectivity to Analysis Services 451 Analysis Services and Fail-Over Clustering 453 Summary 455

Managing Aggregation Designs 511

Query Execution Architecture 522

Performance Analysis and Tuning Tools 529

Analyzing Query Performance Issues 538

Query Optimization Techniques 541

Scale Out with Read-Only Database 547

Writeback Query Performance 548

Part IV: Integration with Microsoft Products

Data Mining Algorithms in SQL Server Analysis Services 2008 559

Summary 599

Analyzing Data in Excel 2007 601

ProClarity 664

Microsoft Performance Point Server 2007 673

Summary 675

Summary 746

Creating an Integration Services Project 748

Creating Integration Services Packages for Analysis Services Operations 749

Automating Execution of SSIS Packages 771

Summary 777

Report Server 781 Creating a Report on a Relational Database 781 Creating Reports Based on a UDM 789

Managing Your Analysis Services Reports 816

Ad-Hoc Reports Using Report Builder 821

Summary 854

Securing Your Dimension Data 858

Summary 896

Chapter 23: Inventory Scenarios 897

Inventory Control and Orders 897

Presenting Budget Information 924

Currency Conversion Scenario (m:n) 937

Summary 950

Sessions 960

Summary 989

Index 993

Introduction

Analysis Services 2005 was a significant leap from Analysis Services 2000 in building your multidimensional databases right from the concept of building your cubes in Business Intelligence Development Studio to the concept of the Unified Dimensional Model with attribute and user

hierarchies The first edition of this book, Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX , was

aimed at novice to advanced users and was very well received by the readers Analysis Services 2005 is a large and complex product that needed a lot of fine - tuning to get the best performance

Analysis Services 2008 added enhancements to the Analysis Services 2005 tools that make it easy to use and build your databases right for efficient performance to significant enhancements on the server to provide improved performance Hence, we decided to write this book to provide insight into the enhancements in Analysis Services 2008 and help you understand how to utilize them effectively for your business needs If you have read the first edition of the book, you will find several chapters ’ titles to

be the same Because Analysis Services 2008 is an incremental release, we have made enhancements to each chapter appropriately We have enhanced the performance chapters and added a few additional scenarios that we believe will help you to understand and build multidimensional databases efficiently This book still is targeted at novice to advanced users If you are not familiar with SQL Server Analysis Services 2005, we highly recommend you go through the chapters in sequence to understand and use Analysis Services 2008 effectively to build, process, and deploy top - of - the - line business intelligence applications

We are not shy about admitting to the apparent complexity of the product when faced with the user interface, which happens to be embedded in the Microsoft Visual Studio shell This is great for you, especially if you are already familiar with the Visual Studio development environment With this book,

we want to show that not only will you overcome any possible initial shock regarding the user interface, but you will come to see it as your friend It turns out there are many wizards to accomplish common tasks, or you can design the analytic infrastructure from the ground up — it is up to you

This formidable yet user - friendly interface will empower you to implement business analytics of a caliber formerly reserved for academicians writing up government grant proposals or Ph.D

dissertations More importantly, this power to turn data into information, and we mean real, usable, business - related decision - making information, can impact the bottom line of your company in terms of dollars earned and dollars saved And that is what data warehousing, ultimately, is all about Put another way, the purpose of all this data warehousing is simple; it is about generating actionable information from the data stores created by a company ’ s sales, inventory, and other data sources In sum, it is all about decision support

Who This Book Is For

What was the impetus for you to pick up this book? Perhaps you are passionate about extracting information from reams of raw data; or perhaps you have some very specific challenges on the job right now that you think might be amenable to a business analysis – based solution; or perhaps you have used Analysis Services 2005 and want to learn about Analysis Services 2008 Then, there is always the lure of fame and fortune Please be aware that attaining expert status in data warehousing can lead to lucrative consulting and salaried opportunities However, it won ’ t likely make you as rich as becoming a purveyor of nothing - down real estate courses If your desire is to leave the infomercial career path to others and get really serious about data warehousing in general and business intelligence in particular, you have just the book in your hands to start or continue on your path to subject mastery

The obvious question now is what are the prerequisites for reading and understanding the content of

this book? You certainly do not have to already know the intricacies of data warehousing, you will learn

that here as you go If you have only the foggiest notion of what a relational database is; well, this book

is going to challenge you at best and bury you at worst If you are not intimidated by what you just read,

this book is for you If you have worked on data warehouses using non - Microsoft products and want to

learn how Microsoft can do it better, this book is for you If you are a database administrator, MIS

Professional, or application developer interested in exploiting the power of business intelligence, this

book is definitely for you!

What This Book Covers

Analysis Services 2008 is the premier multidimensional database product from Microsoft This is the

most recent of four releases from Microsoft to date In this release, the tools and server provided have

been designed for use as an enterprise - class Business Intelligence Server and we think Microsoft has

been successful Analysis Services 2008 extends on top of Analysis Services 2005 and provides you with

powerful tools to design, build, test, and deploy your multidimensional databases By integrating the

tools within Visual Studio you really get the feel of building a Business Intelligence (BI) project Similar

to any application you build within VS, you build your BI projects and deploy them to an Analysis

Services instance Due to the product design that is integrated with the Visual Studio shell and enhanced

features you definitely have to know how to create cubes, dimensions, and many other objects, maintain

them, and support your BI users Similar to its well - liked predecessors, Analysis Services 2008 supports

the MDX language, by which you can query data MDX is for querying multidimensional databases

much like SQL is for querying relational databases The MDX language is a component of the OLE DB

for OLAP specification and is supported by other BI vendors Microsoft ’ s Analysis Services 2008

provides certain extensions to the MDX supported by Analysis Services 2005 that help you to achieve

best performance from your multidimensional databases

This book walks you through the entire product and the important features of the product with the help

of step - by - step instructions on building multidimensional databases Within each chapter you will not

only learn how to use the features, but also learn more about the features at a user level and what

happens behind the scenes to make things work We believe this will provide you with additional insight

into how features really work and hence provide insight into how they are best exploited It will also

enhance your ability to debug problems that you might not have been able to otherwise This behind

the - scenes view is often surfaced through exposure of XML for Analysis (XMLA), created by the product

based on user interface settings It works like this: Analysis Services 2008 uses the XMLA specification to

communicate between client and server, and the Analysis Services 2008 tools communicate to the server

using XMLA Once you have designed your multidimensional database using the tools, you need to

send the definition to the server At that time the tools use XMLA to send the definitions You will learn

these definitions so that you have the ability to design a custom application that interacts with an

Analysis Services instance

MDX is the language used for data retrieval from Analysis Services You will get an introduction to the

MDX language with basic concepts and the various MDX functions in this book When you are browsing

data using Analysis Services tools, those tools send appropriate MDX to the instance of Analysis Services

that contains the target data By learning the MDX sent to the server for the various desired operations,

you will begin to understand the intricacies of MDX and thereby improve your own MDX coding skills

by extension Finally, you will learn to optimize your MDX queries to get the best performance from

your Analysis Services

face of those trade - off decisions — especially with the help of a few scenarios — and there are many scenarios discussed in this book The scenarios are geared toward some of the common business problems that are currently faced by existing Analysis Services customers Although there is no pretension that this book will teach you business per se, it is a book on BI and we did take the liberty of explaining certain business concepts that you are sure to run into eventually For example, the often misunderstood concept of depreciation is explained in some detail Again, this aspect of the book is shallow, but we hope what pure business concepts are covered will provide you with a more informed basis from which to work If you know the concepts already, well, why not read about the ideas again? There might be some new information in there for you

Finally, this book covers integration of Analysis Services with other SQL Server 2008 components: Data Mining, Integrations Services and Reporting Services, as well as Microsoft Office products These chapters will help you go beyond just a passing level of understanding of Analysis Services 2008; it is really integration of these disparate components that ship in the box with SQL Server that allow you to build start to finish BI solutions that are scalable, maintainable, have good performance characteristics, and highlight the right information Do not skip the chapters that do not at first seem crucial to understanding Analysis Services 2008 itself; it is the whole picture that brings the real value Get that whole picture for stellar success and return on your investment of time and energy

How This Book Is Str uctured

The authors of books in the Wrox Professional series attempt to make each chapter as stand - alone as possible This book is no exception However, owing to the sophistication of the subject matter and the manner in which certain concepts are necessarily tied to others has somewhat undermined this most noble intention In fact, unless you are a seasoned data warehousing professional, or otherwise have experience with earlier versions of Analysis Services, it is advised you take a serial approach to reading chapters Work through the first seven chapters in order because they will collectively provide you with some architectural context, a good first look at the product, as well as how to effectively design your cubes, an introduction to MDX, and an introduction to managing your Analysis Services server Just to remind you, in the simplest terms, MDX is to Analysis Services what SQL is to SQL Server Ok, that was just too simple an analogy; but let ’ s not get ahead of ourselves! As for the actual layout of the book, we have divided the book into roughly four major sections

In Part I we introduce the basic concepts and then get you kick - started using Analysis Services with most

of the common operations that you need to design your databases You will become familiarized with the product if you aren ’ t already, and hopefully it will provide you some sense of achievement, which will certainly help motivate you to go beyond the simple stuff and move to the advanced

Part II contains chapters that prepare you for the more advanced topics concerning the creation of multidimensional databases such as multiple measure groups, Business Intelligence wizards, Key Performance Indicators, and Actions You will learn about the calculation model in Analysis Services

2008 and enhance your dimensions and cube designs using Business Intelligence Development Studio Further, you will learn more about extending MDX via external functions, as well as how to effectively

do data writeback in your cube

In Part III of the book, you will learn how to administer your Analysis Services programmatically as well

as designing and optimizing your cube for best performance

In Part IV, we cover the integration of Analysis Services with other SQL Server 2008 components and Microsoft Office products that help you build solutions and provide the best support possible to your administrators and BI users This is also the section where you will discover Data Mining and how Data Mining along with Microsoft Office 2007 makes it easy to use and effective to perform analysis on data Finally in Part V, we provide various scenarios from securing your data, to budgeting, to analyzing Web traffic analysis These scenarios will help you to understand and model similar business requirements

Together, these five sections, that is to say, this book, will provide you a full - blown BI learning

experience Because BI and BI applications constitute such an incredibly complex and massive field of

endeavor, no one book can possibly cover it all In terms of BI though the eyes of SQL Server Analysis

Services 2008, we hope this book has got it covered!

We also encourage you to download and take a look at Appendix A; it is the complete MDX Reference

We thank Microsoft for providing the content for Appendix A In the first edition of the book, Appendix

A was included along with the book Due to the Analysis Services 2008 features we have covered in this

book and the additional scenarios, we have made Appendix A available for download so that the book

doesn ’ t become too large You can find it on this book ’ s page on www.wrox.com

What You Need to Use This Book

You need a computer running some version of the Windows operating system, like Windows Vista

Professional, for example, and a copy of SQL Server 2008 installed on that system In addition you also

need the SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence samples that can be downloaded from

www.codeplex.com Please see the appropriate documentation from Microsoft for the hardware

requirements needed to support the particular version of Windows you own

Conventions

To help you get the most from the text and keep track of what ’ s happening, we ’ ve used a number of

conventions throughout the book

Boxes like this one hold important, not - to - be forgotten information that is directly

relevant to the surrounding text

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As for styles in the text:

We highlight new terms and important words when we introduce them

We show keyboard strokes like this: Ctrl+A

We show URLs and code within the text like so: persistence.properties

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In code examples we highlight new and important code with a gray background

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context, or has been shown before

You’ll also want to have the databases from the SQL2008.AdventureWorks_OLTP_DB_v2008.zip and SQL2008 AdventureWorks_DW_BI_v2008.zip files installed These databases are not installed with SQL Server 2008 by default The AdventureWorks DW files (along with the other SQL Server database files) can be downloaded from www.wrox.com/go/SQLServer2008RTMDataSets Download and install the SQL Server 2008 Adventure Works DW 2008 sample database for your machine’s architecture For example, if you have an x64 machine, the sample database to install is: SQL2008.AdventureWorks_DW_BI_v2008.x64.msi.

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Errata

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of the title lists Then, on the book details page, click the Book Errata link On this page you can view all errata that has been submitted for this book and posted by Wrox editors A complete book list including links to each book ’ s errata is also available at www.wrox.com/misc-pages/booklist.shtml

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appropriate, post a message to the book ’ s errata page and fix the problem in subsequent editions of the book

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Part I

Introduction

Chapter 1: Introduction to Data Warehousing and SQL Server

2008 Analysis Services Chapter 2: First Look at Analysis Services 2008 Chapter 3: Introduction to MDX

Chapter 4: Working with Data Sources and Data Source Views Chapter 5: Dimension Design

Chapter 6: Cube Design Chapter 7: Administering Analysis Services

Introduction to Data Warehousing and SQL Ser ver

2008 Analysis Ser vices

Business intelligence (BI) helps enterprises to gain insight from historical data and formulate strategic initiatives for the future The historical data are stored as an electronic repository, which is called a data warehouse A data warehouse is a system of records (a business intelligence gathering system) that takes data from a company ’ s operational databases and other data sources and transforms it into a structure conducive to business analysis Business calculations are often performed on the organized data to further its usefulness for making business decisions Finally, the data is made available to the end user for querying, reporting, and analysis A data warehouse system that is cleansed, is organized, and has optimized storage of historical records gives the business an intelligence gathering system to understand the business dynamics Business analysis can be done in reactive mode or predictive mode Reactive mode business analysis (also known

as business analytics) is a function where information workers, business analysts, and other business users investigate the system of records and identify patterns and trends, and make business decisions to improve their business processes Predictive mode analysis (also known as predictive analytics or data mining) is done using mathematical models to predict future trends on the system of records The general approach to storing business data in a dimensional model and providing quick answers by slicing and dicing the business data is known as On Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) OLAP systems are architected in different ways The most common types are MOLAP (Multidimensional OLAP), ROLAP (Relational OLAP), and HOLAP (Hybrid OLAP) SQL Server 2008 is a business intelligence platform that provides a scalable infrastructure with server (Analysis Services and Reporting Services) and tools (Integration Services and Reporting Services)

to extract, transform, load, build, query, and report data warehouse solutions Now that you have the big picture of data warehousing, take a look at what you learn in this chapter

In this chapter you learn what data warehousing really is and how it relates to business intelligence This

information comes wrapped in a whole load of new concepts, and you get a look at the best known

approaches to warehousing with the introduction of those concepts We explain data warehousing in

several different ways and we are sure you will understand it You will finally see how SQL Server 2008

Analysis Services (SSAS 2008) puts it all together in terms of architecture — at both client and server

levels

A Closer Look at Data Warehousing

Data warehousing has existed since the beginning of computers and information systems Initially, concepts

of data warehousing were referred to as Decision Support Systems (DSS) In the book Building the Data

Warehouse , Bill Inmon described the data warehouse as “ a subject oriented, integrated, non - volatile , and time

variant collection of data in support of management ’ s decisions ” According to Inmon, the subject

orientation of a data warehouse differs from the operational orientation seen in OnLine Transaction Processing

(OLTP) systems; so a subject seen in a data warehouse might relate to customers, whereas an operation in an

OLTP system might relate to a specific application like sales processing and all that goes with it

The word integrated means that throughout the enterprise, data points should be defined consistently or

there should be some integration methodology to force consistency at the data warehouse level One

example would be how to represent the entity Microsoft If Microsoft were represented in different databases

as MSFT, MS, Microsoft, and MSoft, it would be difficult to meaningfully merge these in a data warehouse

The best - case solution is to have all databases in the enterprise refer to Microsoft as, say, MSFT, thereby

making the merger of this data seamless A less desirable, but equally workable, solution is to force all the

variants into one during the process of moving data from the operational system to the data warehouse

A data warehouse is referred to as non - volatile because it differs from operational systems, which are

often transactional in nature and updated regularly The data warehouse is generally loaded at some

preset interval, which may be measured in weeks or even months This is not to say it is never measured

in days; but even if updates do occur daily, that is still a sparse schedule compared to the constant

changes being made to transactional systems

The final element in this definition regards time variance, which is a sophisticated way of saying how far

back the stored data in the system reaches In the case of operational systems, the time period is quite

short, perhaps days, weeks, or months In the case of the warehouse, it is quite long — typically on the

order of years This last item might strike you as fairly self - evident because you would have a hard time

analyzing business trends if your data didn ’ t date back further than two months So, there you have it,

the classic definition that no good book on data warehousing should be without

OLAP systems are architected in different ways depending on how the data warehouse is built A

classic OLAP or MOLAP system ’ s data warehouse is built using a multidimensional store that is

optimized for performance and uses dimensional models Alternatively, the data warehouse is built using

the Relational Tables in the operational databases using a specialized schema design that is optimized for

storage Hybrid OLAP is an architecture that provides performance and optimized storage There is more

to come in this chapter on the differences between relational and multidimensional databases