Microsoft® SQL Server™ OLAP Services provides wizards, editors, and information to make OLAP technology easier to use.
You can use the online tutorial to master the OLAP Manager in about an hour. Designed for both beginners and experienced online analytical processing (OLAP) users, the tutorial walks you through the steps to create a basic cube as well as more advanced operations such as creating partitions and virtual cubes. The tutorial is an excellent tool to learn about OLAP and the operation and features of the OLAP Manager.
You can also find information about OLAP and OLAP Services version 7.0 in the right pane of the OLAP Manager.
You can view object properties and metadata, and browse cube data in the right pane of the OLAP Manager as you traverse the tree view in the left pane.
You can build all the necessary structures to create an OLAP cube with an easy-to-use wizard. The wizard walks you through the entire cube design and implementation process, from mapping data sources and creating dimensions to defining measures.
You can edit existing cube structures and create new ones using simple drag-and-drop operations. The Cube editor complements the Cube wizard, enabling you to revise cubes you created with the wizard or to quickly create new ones. The editor integrates various views of the cube:
You can create a shared dimension for use by any cube or a private dimension for use in a single cube quickly and easily with the Dimension wizard. You can map database dimension table columns to dimension levels or use the built-in time dimension generator to create a variety of time dimensions based on a date-time column in the database. You can use the Dimension wizard with flat, star, or snowflake data warehouse schemas.
You can edit existing shared dimension structures and create new ones using simple drag-and-drop operations. The Dimension editor complements the Dimension wizard, enabling you to revise dimensions you created with the wizard or to quickly create new ones. You can also preview dimension data in the editor.
You can use this wizard to guide you through the process of incorporating new data into your cube. An incremental update adds new data to a cube without the necessity of rebuilding aggregations and reloading all data.
This wizard helps you create a new partition to contain a portion of the data in your cube. Partitions enable you to distribute and optimize a cube’s data into discrete segments on a single server or across multiple servers.
Note User-defined partitions are available only if you install Microsoft SQL Server OLAP Services, Enterprise Edition.
You can use this wizard to specify the mode of storage for cube data and to help you design aggregations appropriate to the intended use of your cube. The options available to you in this wizard enable you to optimize the tradeoff between response time and storage requirements according to the needs of your application and users.
The Usage Analysis wizard helps you understand how a cube is being used by displaying logged query information such as date, user, query response time, and frequency in tabular and graphical format.
You can use the Usage-Based Optimization wizard to help you tune cube performance based on actual usage of the cube by users. You can direct the wizard to create aggregations to improve performance based on any combination of users, the number of times a query was executed, query response time, the mode of storage where the data resides, or a date range.
You can use this wizard to join cubes and select dimensions and measures from them to create a virtual cube. A virtual cube enables a single query to be routed to multiple cubes, including cubes running on different servers. A virtual cube appears to users as if it were a real cube, but does not require additional storage space; it is similar to a view in a relational database that joins tables.
You can create shared virtual dimensions quickly and easily with the Virtual Dimension wizard. You can select member properties defined for shared dimensions to create a virtual dimension, and then use the virtual dimension in any cube that also uses the dimension from which the member properties were selected.
You can view cube data without leaving the OLAP Manager. You do not need to switch to another application to check your cube designs.
OLAP Services uses the Microsoft Data Source Locator component for selecting OLE DB or ODBC data sources.