MDX Solutions: With Microsoft® SQL Server™ Analysis Services 2005 and Hyperion® Essbase, Second Edition

Chapter 17. Working with Local Cubes

Local cube files provide a way for users to work with data in a disconnected client setting. In fact, local cubes are required if your users are to access data without being connected to a server. As far as client software is concerned, a local cube can be very similar to a server cube that is created in a limited database. Only a few areas of MDX do not work with a local cube, so it is possible (accepting a variety of requirements and constraints) to construct applications where a user can work with either server cubes or local cubes and not see any difference between them.

Unfortunately, this area of functionality has been subject to some indecision on the part of the designers of Analysis Services: With the release of Analysis Services 2005, there are now three distinct syntaxes for the creation of local cubes. OLAP Services introduced the CREATE CUBE statement, which allowed a great deal of flexibility when creating cubes but was extremely complicated and difficult to use. As a result, in Analysis Services 2000 Service Pack 1, the CREATE GLOBAL CUBE statement was added to make building local cubes from server-based cubes much easier, at the expense of losing some of the flexibility of the CREATE CUBE statement. Finally, in Analysis Services 2005, with the introduction of Analysis Services Scripting Language, it is now possible to create local cubes using the same syntax as you would use to create server-based cubes.

This chapter details the ...