OLAP Services Data Warehousing Support

Microsoft® SQL Server™ OLAP Services provides online analytical processing (OLAP) services to applications.

OLAP focuses on finding trends in aggregated or summarized data. The main objects used by OLAP programs are multidimensional cubes. A multidimensional cube records a set of data derived from fact tables and dimensions. A fact table records data about a set of transactions. Measures are numeric columns from the fact table that are of interest to the user. For example, a car sales fact table could provide measures such as sale price, invoice cost, tax paid, and discount. A cube represents how these measures vary over multiple dimensions, such as by car dealer, by location, by customer, or by date.

OLAP Services provides the capability of designing, creating, and managing cubes from a data warehouse, and then making them available to client applications written using either the OLE DB 2.0 OLAP extensions, or the Microsoft ActiveX® Data Objects 2.0 Multidimensional Objects (ADO MD).

The OLAP server performs multidimensional queries of data and stores the results in its multidimensional storage. It speeds the analysis of fact tables into cubes, stores the cubes until needed, and then quickly returns the data to clients.

The OLAP server is managed through an API called the Microsoft Decision Support Objects (DSO). OLAP Services provides a snap-in for the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). This MMC snap-in uses DSO to provide administrators with an easy-to-use graphical interface for defining, creating, and managing the cubes built by the OLAP server. DSO can also be called from custom applications, which in turn can be added to the OLAP Manager as an add-in.

OLAP Services passes its multidimensional data to a middle-tier PivotTable® Service. The PivotTable Service operates as an OLE DB for OLAP provider. It exposes the multidimensional data to applications using either the OLE DB 2.0 OLAP extensions, or the ADO MD API that wraps the OLE DB OLAP extensions.

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