Introducing OLAP Services

Microsoft® SQL Server™ OLAP Services is a new middle-tier server for online analytical processing (OLAP). The OLAP Services system includes a powerful server that constructs multidimensional cubes of data for analysis and provides rapid client access to cube information. PivotTable® Service, the included OLE DB compliant provider, is used by Microsoft Excel and applications from other vendors to retrieve multidimensional data from the server and present it to the user.

OLAP Services organizes data from a data warehouse into multidimensional cubes with precalculated summary information to provide rapid answers to complex analytical queries.

Among the key features of OLAP Services are:

• Ease of use provided by the user interface and wizards.
• A flexible, robust data model for cube definition and storage.
• Write-enabled cubes for “what if” scenario analyses.
• Scalable architecture that provides a variety of storage scenarios and an automated solution to the “data explosion syndrome” that plagues traditional OLAP technologies.
• Integration of administration tools, security, data sources, and client/server caching.
• Widely supported APIs and open architecture to support custom applications.

For more information, see Features of OLAP Services.