SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services provides, for the first time, a unified and integrated view of all your business data as the foundation for all of your traditional reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP) analysis, Key Performance Indicator (KPI) scorecards, and data mining.

Read more about how features in Analysis Services can help extend business intelligence to every level of your business.

This Page’s Contents
Unified Dimensional Model
Proactive Caching
Advanced Business Intelligence
Web Services
Enterprise Capabilities

Unified Dimensional Model
Analysis Services provides a business semantic model, referred to as a Unified Dimensional Model (UDM), that defines business entities, business logic, calculations, and metrics. The UDM is a central place that serves as the single version of truth for all reports, spreadsheets, OLAP browsers, KPIs, and analytical applications.

Using the powerful new Data Source View feature, the UDM is mapped to a host of heterogeneous back-end data sources, providing a complete and integrated picture of the business regardless of the location of the data. With friendly descriptions of the business entities, navigation hierarchies, multiple perspectives, and even automatic translations to native languages, users will find it easy to explore corporate business data.
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Proactive Caching
Proactive Caching enables the combination of real-time updates with multidimensional online analytical processing (MOLAP) class performance. Analysis Services maintains a highly compressed and optimized data cache that is maintained automatically as the data in the underlying source databases changes. The cache provides superb query performance and isolates back-end source systems from the load of the analytical queries
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Advanced Business Intelligence
The KPI framework provides a rich centralized repository defining key metrics and scorecards. The KPI framework in Analysis Services lets you easily build balanced scorecards and other types of business performance management applications.

Translations. Translations provide a simple and centrally managed mechanism for storing and presenting analytic data to users in their preferred languages.

MDX Scripts. Multidimensional Expression (MDX) Scripts are the new mechanism for defining calculated members, named sets, and cell calculations.

Business Intelligence Wizards. A set of easy-to-use wizards can help even the most novice user in modeling some of the more complex business intelligence problems.

Semi-Additive Measures. This new measure aggregation type for advance data modeling includes last-nonempty, last-child, first-child, average-of-children, and even by-account-type
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Web Services
XML for Analysis (XML/A) is the native, standards-based protocol for communication with the Analysis Services server. New kinds of applications are enabled and easy to develop—applications that integrate analytics with operations in real time that can access the data from any platform and any language.
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Enterprise Capabilities
SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services sets a new standard for business intelligence servers in enterprise scalability, manageability, and productivity.

Scalability. Analysis Services scales to the most demanding analytical and reporting applications. With a new dimensional architecture, UDM-enabled applications let users quickly perform rich and intuitive ad hoc analysis using hundreds of dimensions and hierarchies. Hierarchies make it easier for users to navigate and query UDMs with hundreds of millions of members.

In addition, the new architecture removes the limitations of memory–resident dimensions and the number of children members per parent. With an XML?A–based communication protocol that is paired with greatly optimized role–based security, Analysis Services helps a UDM handle thousands of users, enabling enterprise-scale business intelligence applications using Web middle-tier or client-server architectures.

Manageability. By integrating the management tools for the relational engine and Analysis Services, business intelligence administrators benefit from having a single, uniform environment for managing SQL Server Analysis Services. With SQL Server Management Studio, administrators can easily script Analysis Services objects and operations or tasks. Administrators can use a rich editor for MDX and Data Mining eXtensions (DMX) queries. SQL Profiler can be used to trace, capture, and replay Analysis Services queries and other commands. Multi-instancing, enhanced backup and restore, synchronization of databases across servers, and improved fine-grained administrative permissions are some of the new manageability tools available.

Productivity. Integrated with Visual Studio, the intuitive Analysis Services wizards and editors provide a true application development environment supporting the project's full life cycle. Source control, versioning, workstation isolation, embedded debugging, and configuration management are some of the benefits of the new Business Intelligence Development Studio.
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