Understanding Analysis Services

You don’t need Analysis Services as part of your BI system. You could create a BI system with a data warehouse and a couple of reporting applications. Even if you want to have the benefits of OLAP in your BI system, you can choose any of several OLAP vendors. So what makes Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services a good choice? In the first section of this chapter, you learned three major benefits of OLAP technology. Now you will learn how Analysis Services provides those benefits.

Analysis Services and Speed

Speed comes from storing precalculated values. Querying a 100-million-row table for a grand total is going to take much more time than querying a 100-row summary table. Because most queries can be satisfied ...

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