Analysis Services Architecture
Analysis Services builds on the concepts of the data warehouse to present data in a multidimensional format instead of the two-dimensional paradigm of the relational database. When selecting a set of relational data, the query identifies a value via row and column coordinates, whereas the multidimensional store relies on selecting one or more items from each dimension to identify the value to be returned. Likewise, you can organize a result set returned by the multidimensional database along many axes.
Chapter 51, “Business Intelligence Database Design,” presents the background on Business Intelligence and data warehousing. If you are unfamiliar with these areas, this background can help you understand Analysis Services.
Instead of the two-dimensional table, Analysis Services uses the multidimensional cube to hold data in the database. The cube thus presents an entity that can be queried via multidimensional expressions (MDX), the Analysis Services equivalent of SQL.
Analysis Services uses a combination of caching and precalculation strategies, aggregations, and partitioning to deliver query performance that is dramatically better than queries against a data warehouse.
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