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Part IX: Business Intelligence
the template from the list that corresponds to your edition of SQL Server. Work through the
rest of the wizard choosing measures and dimensions that make sense in your business.At the Completing the Wizard page, select the Generate Schema Now option to automati-
cally start the Schema Generation Wizard. Work through the remaining wizard pages. At
the end of the Schema Generation Wizard, all the Analysis Services and relational objects
are created. Even if the generated system does not exactly meet a current need, it provides
an interesting example. You can modify the resulting design and regenerate the schema by
right-clicking the project within the Solution Explorer and choosing Generate Relational
Schema at any time.Analysis Services Architecture
Analysis Services builds on the concepts of the data warehouse to present data in a mul-
tidimensional format instead of the two-dimensional paradigm of the relational database.
When selecting a set of relational data, the query identifi es 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, aggrega-
tions, and partitioning to deliver query performance that is dramatically better than que-
ries against a data warehouse.What’s New with Cubes and Analysis Services in
SQL 2012
Not much has changed with Analysis Services from a multidimensional perspective in this release.
There are a couple of key things to note, however:■ (^) New Tabular Model to provide for self-service model development.
■ (^) SQL Server Data Tools are now the default working platform for SSAS. This works in Visual
Studio 2010.
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