Cubes without A Data Warehouse?

  • Greetz!

    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!

    Even as a mother protects with her life
    Her child, her only child,
    So with a boundless heart
    Should one cherish all living beings;

  • I remember developers creating Cognos cubes out of a relational database so the answer would be yes, it is possible.

    _____________________________________
    Pablo (Paul) Berzukov

    Author of Understanding Database Administration available at Amazon and other bookstores.

    Disclaimer: Advice is provided to the best of my knowledge but no implicit or explicit warranties are provided. Since the advisor explicitly encourages testing any and all suggestions on a test non-production environment advisor should not held liable or responsible for any actions taken based on the given advice.
  • It's possible. You can "model" a dimensional starschema in the data source view of Analysis Services.

    Need an answer? No, you need a question
    My blog at https://sqlkover.com.
    MCSE Business Intelligence - Microsoft Data Platform MVP

  • I'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.

    Even as a mother protects with her life
    Her child, her only child,
    So with a boundless heart
    Should one cherish all living beings;

  • Why DONT you want to build a DW? apart from a pretty steep learning curve, I don't think there is any licencing issue with R2

    you can build pivots for specific datasets, or you may be better off connecting XL to the R2 database and using pivot tables

    A 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.

Viewing 5 posts - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply