Analysis Services in SQL Server 2008

In a relational database stored data are interrogated by querying, creating reports, linking them to applications that are developed, however the analysis and understanding of data are issues that go beyond these actions.

SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) comes into play in this context, and analyzes the data on the database from a different perspective than the system administrator or programmer.

This instrument was introduced with SQL Server 2000, has been improved and enhanced in later versions of Microsoft's DBMS (to the last version available in SQL Server 2008) and provides a platform on which you can develop business intelligence solutions.

The term business intelligence refers to a set of processes by which we collect and analyze strategic information that can lead any organization to gain a competitive advantage in the market in which it operates.

In practice, after processing, the information is used to support the best possible decisions of managers of a company or other business functions.

The platform SSAS has two basic components:

• Online Analytical Processing (OLAP): designed for storing and querying large amounts of data to be used for reporting and analysis;
• Data Mining: Models provide data analysis aimed to identify these trends and patterns.

The processes are different from the so-called processes OLAP OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) The latter in fact allow you to perform actions on a small database, such as creating tables, views, procedures, or querying the data and, as mentioned earlier , the processes used to analyze OLAP data.

The core architecture is a particular OLAP database called data warehouse (inventory data), which contains data analyzed appropriately can provide decision support.

The data warehouse using data from multiple databases and import mechanisms are asynchronous and periodic (and thus not suffer the performance of data sources).

OLTP systems thus provide data for the OLAP environment, ie have a data source (data source) for that environment.

In the following image (taken from Microsoft) you can identify where SSAS fits than the other components of SQL Server and see how it is closely related to Integration Services, another key component analyzed in a previous article

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