Summary

Analysis Services 2000 was already a leader in business intelligence. SQL Server 2005 continues this leadership by introducing the model "integrate, analyze, and report." The new tools and features introduced in this release make SQL Server 2005 an obvious choice for designing, developing, and deploying BI solutions. This chapter focuses on the "analyze" part of the new BI model and describes the latest and greatest features in Analysis Services 2005.

The chapter starts with an overview of OLAP, data warehousing, and BI concepts. Then it talks about some of the strengths of the Analysis Services 2000 release, the foundation on which Analysis Services 2005 is built. The chapter then discusses the new features in Analysis Services 2005, including the new UDM, cube and dimension enhancements, multiple-instance and clustering support, XMLA and AMO support, and data mining enhancements. The subsequent sections in the chapter provide an overview of Analysis Services 2005 performance tuning, administration, security, and migration-related topics. The chapter concludes with an overview of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Service, an integral part of the BI development lifecycle in SQL Server 2005.

This chapter concludes the discussion on business intelligence support in SQL Server 2005. Chapter 14 discusses Service Broker, a very interesting feature introduced in SQL Server 2005 that allows developers to build scalable applications by using asynchronous messaging within the database.