HTTP Connectivity to Analysis Services

We expect customers would want to expose the data from Analysis Services to the end users through web application. Analysis Services 2000 supported data access from the Web through a component called DATA PUMP. Analysis Services 2005 uses a similar architecture to support data access for Web applications. The PUMP component needs to be loaded within Internet Information Server (IIS) as an ISAPI dll. In order to provide web access to data from Analysis Services you need to configure your IIS appropriately. You need to set up virtual directories, copy appropriate DLLs provided by Analysis Services 2005 and setup appropriate permission on IIS so that users can access data from Analysis Services. The PUMP does not necessarily have to be setup on the same machine as Analysis Services. Using Analysis Services 2005 you can configure several data PUMPs to be directing queries to various Analysis Services instances. Each PUMP has a configuration file where the server name and certain other properties are configured. In order to access Analysis Services data over the web a user would connect to IIS using HTTP. IIS in turn directs the request to Analysis Services instance over TCP/IP with appropriate credentials set up on IIS. The architecture of the connection to Analysis Services over HTTP is shown in Figure 12-31.

You can configure security on IIS to either use anonymous connection to Analysis services, perform username and password authentication on IIS or perform windows authentication. The steps for setting up HTTP connectivity using data PUMP includes configuring your IIS by creating virtual directories and configuring the PUMP and security for the users. Microsoft has published a white paper called "Configuring HTTP Access to SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services on Microsoft Windows XP," Published: July 27, 2005. We recommend you to go to http://www.microsoft.com, search for the paper with the above provided title.

Figure 12-31