Chapter 9: Manipulating Multidimensional Data

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In This Chapter

This chapter is a case study that covers the design and implementation of an OLAP solution in Visual Studio .NET utilizing the industry’s premier OLAP Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services as the data store.

As an in-house systems developer, you realize that your company is bracing for an era of data revolution. This is at a time when information is the key to the success of your organization and its business processes. The marketers would like to analyze the trend of customer behavior, while the salespeople want to keep track of sales activities over a long period of time. Such information is an imperative part of plotting your company’s future marketing and production strategy. As a systems developer, you are struggling to design an effective and scalable software solution that your company’s analysts can use to assess its performance in the marketplace.

You quickly realize that implementing custom reports based on the company’s day-to-day data processing system would simply create a bottleneck as more stress is imposed on the databases. Thus, you revert to the design of an OLAP data warehouse.