Home Forums Data Warehousing Analysis Services Can anyone let me know why not so many companies choose SSAS for data analysis and base layer for dashboard? RE: Can anyone let me know why not so many companies choose SSAS for data analysis and base layer for dashboard?

  • A gartner report is very useful to evaluate the presence of MS in the market but not of OLAP/MDX within any vendors BI stack. I don't the the questions is MS vs non-MS but rather MDX vs SQL as the primary tool in serving up data to a BI app (but correct me if I'm not reading the question right.)

    If that's the question than the job market is a much better indication of SSAS use than any market share report. Especially since you can't really buy SQL without SSAS and vice-a-versa.

    I actually believe SSAS is well under-utilized but base it on the fact that most BI app vendors do not have TRUE native functionality for building reports on top of cubes (eg, SSRS, MicroStrategy, and most Mobile BI platforms besides roambi.) And by TRUE native functionally I mean that a report is designed to query a cube directly (as can be done in excel through a pivot table or the GetPivotData formulas) rather than returning the data to a tabular form and then serving it up for the report.

    The fact that SSRS returns data from a cubes in tabular form for use in reports is astounding to me!

    In any case, great question!

    Chris