InstantForum.NET v2.9.0SQLServerCentralhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/notifications@sqlservercentral.comThu, 20 Jun 2013 06:07:42 GMT20http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic1336678-1292-1.aspxWhy DONT you want to build a DW? apart from a pretty steep learning curve, I don't think there is any licencing issue with R2you can build pivots for specific datasets, or you may be better off connecting XL to the R2 database and using pivot tablesA lot of cube type analysis can be done in SSRS as well.How big is your data, how GOOD is your data and how well indexed are your tables. On the primary tables, are you mainly inserting records or are there a lot of updates and deletes as well. Is the database OLTP (transactional) or OLAP (analysis and reporting)Do users need to be able to summarise and drill down in many different ways, or do they just want pretty reports. If the latter, then SSAS may be overkill, you can do the same using nise SSRS reports.Thu, 13 Sep 2012 07:41:54 GMTaaron.reesehttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic1336678-1292-1.aspxI've also seen BI-Lite which claims to be able to do the job. I've not been able to test this since it requires .Net 4 which I'm not able to install just yet.I'm not able to use 3rd party tools (at this point) so I should have clarified that I would need to do this in ANSI SQL using SQL Server 2008 R2.Fri, 07 Sep 2012 05:33:27 GMTMothInTheMachinehttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic1336678-1292-1.aspxIt's possible. You can "model" a dimensional starschema in the data source view of Analysis Services.Mon, 30 Jul 2012 00:12:20 GMTKoen Verbeeckhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic1336678-1292-1.aspxI remember developers creating Cognos cubes out of a relational database so the answer would be yes, it is possible.Sun, 29 Jul 2012 15:31:38 GMTPaulB-TheOneAndOnlyhttp://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Topic1336678-1292-1.aspxGreetz!I'm new to the BI space and have been asked to look into using cubes without building a datawarehouse or otherwise restructuring the current reporting database that is in use. Everything I've seen in the way of articles and tutorials about cubes use the AdventureWorksDW database and nothing has used a relational model. Is it possible to build cubes of relational tables? I'm guessing the performance would be abysmal but I'm not certain. Would this solution, if possible, suffice for a small number of users (like 5) doing ad hoc reporting?Any good resources you have for learing more on this would be great.Thanks!Fri, 27 Jul 2012 11:36:05 GMTMothInTheMachine