To be able to drill into multidimensional cube data at several levels, you must implement all of the hierarchies on the database dimensions. Then you'll create the attribute relationships necessary to optimize performance. Analysis Services hierarchies offer plenty of possibilities for displaying the data that your business requires. Rob Sheldon continues his series on SQL Server Analysis Services 2008.  Read more...

Part 4 of this series, Shahfaisal Muhammed brings another method of deploying your SSAS projects to a new server: the synchronize database method. The rest of the series covers other methods.  Read more...

This technical note describes the consolidation options, considerations, and best practices for Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Analysis Services that the SQL CAT team has derived from working with Analysis Services customers. In this technical note, we also discuss an Analysis Services load balancer solution that one of our internal customers uses to load balance queries from Microsoft Excel® and SQL Server Reporting Services clients across multiple query servers to increase query performance and provide availability.  Read more...

Part 3 of this series, Shahfaisal Muhammed brings a common method of deploying your SSAS projects to a new server: backup and restore. The rest of the series covers other methods.  Read more...

After a great presentation from Brian Knight at the NYC User Group, Robert Pearl summarizes some information about SSAS and when it makes sense to use this subsystem. And why you might want to attend that next user group meeting.  Read more...

Continuing with this series, Shahfaisal Muhammed brings us another method of deploying your SSAS projects to a new server. The rest of the series will cover other methods.  Read more...

In part 1 of this series, Shahfaisal Muhammed brings us one method of deploying your SSAS projects to a new server. The rest of the series will cover other methods.  Read more...

A sample chapter from a new book on Analysis Services. Check it out and see if this is the book for you.  Read more...

Join BI Architect Bill Pearson in this introduction to Security in Analysis Services 2008. Here we explore security concepts and implementation, and look forward to hands-on practice with security in other articles of this subseries.  Read more...

BI Architect Bill Pearson continues his discussion of Partition planning for Analysis Services, this time focusing on the settings and properties involved from a SQL Server Management Studio perspective.  Read more...

I have to deploy my SQL Server Analysis Services project to a test server then to a production server after testing is completed. For both of these deployments I need to provide an installation program. I am not allowed to access either of these servers. For my own testing I can deploy my project using Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) and this works great. How can I create an installer that my IT team can use to perform the deployment?  Read more...

Display data series' as a set of points with an XY (scatter) chart - typically to compare distinct values across categories. BI Architect Bill Pearson leads the hands-on creation of an XY chart based upon an Analysis Service data source.  Read more...

Join BI Architect Bill Pearson in this introduction to Partitions in Analysis Services 2008. Here we explore partitioning concepts and advantages, and look forward to hands-on practice with partitions in subsequent articles.  Read more...

BI Architect Bill Pearson introduces Storage in Analysis Service 2008. This article begins an extended examination of storage topics, including partitions and aggregations, within a multiple-article subseries.  Read more...

I have seen the tip Dynamically Control Data Filtering in SQL Server Reporting Services Reports which showed how to leverage a SQL Server database table to filter sales data based on the user running the report. I have a similar requirement to implement dynamic filtering except my data is in a SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) cube and the users query the data with a variety of different tools. How can I implement dynamic security in my case?  Read more...

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services (SSAS) delivers both online analytical processing (OLAP) and data mining functionality for business intelligence applications. This article thoroughly explores the architecture of SSAS and how it can be implemented.  Read more...

Architect Bill Pearson leads the hands-on creation of a simple doughnut chart based upon an Analysis Services data source.  Read more...

Join BI Architect Bill Pearson as he leads hands-on practice with the “Clusters” discretization method in Analysis Services. In this article we continue to explore attribute discretization, as a part of an extended examination of the dimensional model lying at the heart of the integrated Microsoft Business Intelligence solution.  Read more...

Because Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services query and processing performance tuning is a fairly broad subject, this white paper organizes performance tuning techniques into the following three segments.   Read more...

S partitions from the ground up, with advice on binding, merging, and selecting partition data.   Read more...