Chapter 16: Let s Get TogetherIntegrating Olap with Your Applications

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.
—Richard Milhous Nixon

Overview

Reporting Services provides us with a capable tool for delivering Business Intelligence (BI) to decision makers. In some situations, however, our business intelligence solution must be more than a paper report; even more than an interactive report available in a browser. At times, our business intelligence must integrate tightly with other programs and solutions.

Once again, SQL Server 2005 provides us with the tools to fulfill this need. The ADOMD.NET data provider enables us to execute MDX queries against OLAP cubes on Analysis Services servers. Analysis Management Objects (AMO) provides a programming interface for the management of an Analysis Services server and the objects residing on that server. Reporting Services offers a number of methods for integrating reports with applications.

With these features, we can provide our users with the complete package, the integrated solution, the all-in-one application, the tightly coupled, well-oiled … well, you get the picture.