Next Steps

With real-time data, you have the opportunity to do some interesting just-in-time analysis. Credit card companies look for spending that doesn't conform to your usual patterns. In our health-care example, we could use data mining to understand the normal patterns of initial diagnosis at an emergency ward and look for deviations that might provide an early indication of the start of an epidemic or an outbreak of local food poisoning.

Maintaining a Consistent View of the Source Data

In a real-time application, the source data constantly changes. If you need to have a time-consistent view of the data loaded into the data warehouse, you can use snapshot isolation to ensure all the data you read through a package is exactly the same set of data as it was when you initiated the package. You set the isolation level property in the package Transaction properties. Select Snapshot from the drop-down list.

Loading Data Directly into Analysis Services Using Integration Services

Integration Services enables you to push new data directly into a cube or dimension. In the same way that you can define a SQL Server table as the destination in a data flow, you can use a Partition Processing destination and add new data right into the cube, or use the Dimension Processing destination to update the dimensions. This allows you to be quite creative with exactly how "real time" you want your solution to be, without always necessarily having to rely on the proactive caching settings in Analysis Services.

Notification Services

Imagine if the hospital supervisor could get a notification to her cell phone when the number of new admissions to the hospital in the last hour exceeded a critical value. You can implement this scenario in SQL Server 2005 by taking advantage of Notification Services' provider for Analysis Services. Notifications can be triggered based on an MDX query, so with a near-real time BI solution, you could define some KPIs and then send notifications to subscribed users.