Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

13.3. HTTP Connectivity to Analysis Services

You expect customers would want to expose the data from Analysis Services to the end users through web applications. Analysis Services 2000 supported data access from the web through a component called DATA PUMP. Analysis Services 2005 and 2008 use a similar architecture to support data access for web applications. The PUMP component needs to be loaded within Internet Information Server (IIS) as an ISAPI DLL. To provide web access to data from Analysis Services you need to configure your IIS appropriately. You need to set up virtual directories, copy appropriate DLLs provided by Analysis Services, and set up appropriate permission on IIS so that users can access data from Analysis Services. The PUMP does not necessarily have to be set up on the same machine as Analysis Services. Using Analysis Services 2008 you can configure several data PUMPs to be directing queries to various Analysis Services instances. Each PUMP has a configuration file where the server name and certain other properties are configured. To access Analysis Services data over the web a user would connect to IIS using HTTP. IIS in turn directs the request to the Analysis Services instance over TCP/IP with appropriate credentials set up on IIS. The architecture of the connection to Analysis Services over HTTP is shown in Figure 13-1.

Figure 13.1. Figure 13-1

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