Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

5.3. Browsing the Dimension

After successfully creating the Dim Geography dimension, you definitely would like to see the results of what you have created and find out how you can see the members of the dimension. So far, the dimension has been designed but not deployed to the server. Indeed, there has been no interaction with the instance of Analysis Services yet. To see the members of the dimension, Analysis Services needs to receive the details of the dimension (the attributes, member properties, and the multilevel hierarchies you have created). The Analysis Services 2008 tools communicate to the instance of Analysis Services via XMLA (XML for Analysis).

XMLA is an industry-standard, Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)–based XML Application Programming Interface (API) that is designed for OLAP and Data Mining. The XMLA specification defines two functions, Execute and Discover, which are used to send actions to and retrieve data from the host instance. The Execute and Discover functions take several parameters that define the actions the instance of Analysis Services will perform. One of the parameters of the Execute function is the command sent to an instance of Analysis Services. Note that in addition to supporting the functionality defined in the XMLA specification, Analysis Services supports extensions to the standard. Following is a sample Execute request sent to an instance of Analysis Services using XMLA. The Execute request is a modified version of the one in XMLA specification ...