Ensuring that everyone across the organization is provided with the exact data he currently needs is time consuming and expensive. Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services is therefore a solution which enables company managers to save at least a part of the costs thank to its comprehensiveness and scalability.

Different recipients across the organization have specific needs according to - for instance - the place in the company management they take. All of them require data which is timely and accurate, nonetheless these are the only similarities. In most of cases, of course. Simultaneously, they consider different approaches to data the most useful, thereupon the insights they are provided with have to be differentiated too. In point of fact, it takes a lot of money and requires a lot of money to invest, thereupon the highest attention there is paid to the solutions which are flexible and scalable enough themselves to provide the organization with truly comprehensive capabilities. One of such solutions - being simultaneously one of the most popular ones - is Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services. It promises everything today's organizations need - high efficiency and simplicity of usage.

Analysis Services in short

Microsoft - through SQL Server Analysis Services - provides a powerful data mining and online analytical processing capabilities within an easy to use and reach in features environment. Because of the fact that the needs are changing constantly, SQL Server Analysis Services provides appropriate analytical solution scalability so that the system could be adjusted up to the most recent business conditions as quickly as possible.

Additionally, what's benefitial are numerous design aids supplied with Analysis Services best practices - following them ensures significant productivity enhancements. Once the solution consists of mostly familiar tools, driving actionable insights cannot be any problem, and the other benefit is Key Performance Indicators and enterprise analysis data consolidation.

Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services features and benefits

Analysis Services by Microsoft is the solution which numerous organizations make the core of their Business Intelligence systems. That wouldn't be able to work efficiently if not an amazingly scalable infrastructure. In a few words it allows to:

• enhance performance and almost real time resource monitoring thank to dynamic management views use
• save a lot of time by eliminating the need for processing and storage overhead. It's the result of sharing a single, read-only database among a few involved servers
• add a new dimension to already applied solutions so that they provide a global perspective too
• benefit from multiple localization and translation capabilities (native language support)
• enhance the performance of online analytical processing thank to a new Aggregation Designer
• use block computation to eliminate the aggregations which aren't indispensable
• use MOLAP-enabled and write back capabilities to prepare the top performance "what if" business scenarios

However, scalability is only one of a few factors which BI solutions' performance is conditioned by. Thereupon - besides the scalability - helps with development productivity enhancing. It's possible due to:

• Business Intelligence Development Studio, a core for every development need, which consists of visual tools at most (they are easy to use thank to a familiar interface)
• best practice alerts which signalize the defects in design as soon as possible, so that the improvements don't require too complex changes and - therefore - lots of money
• cube, dimension, attribute designers and wizards which can be used for complex business problem modeling, resulting in whole development process acceleration and efficiency enhancement
• easy solution extension thank to plug in algorithms and open architecture

All in all, analytical performance also is meaningful and the specialists from Microsoft know it very well. Thereupon, they let the SQL Server Analysis Services use deeply compressed and optimized data cache (maintained along the changes in underlying databases), the same as boost the performance with the Proactive Caching technology. What else should be mentioned are real time updates combined with MOLAP class performance and easy backup performance optimization.

Simultaneously, Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services allows to go beyond traditional online analytical processing. A single Unified Dimensional Model lets end-users benefit from the power of really comprehensive analytics, which enterprise analysis data consolidation isn't without an influence on. What's important there are:

• relational reporting and OLAP model combination as a mix of flexibility, functional richness, and high performance
• single business view for both, relational and multidimensional data
• Business Intelligence wizards enabling non-IT people model the problems effectively
• a common, central repository for the key performance indicators from all over the organization
• well known Microsoft Office applications enough to access the key performance indicators
• enhanced predictive analytics capabilities, which lead to making deeper conclusions out of historical data, identify the trends in actual data faster, and making more probable predictive analysis
• data mining engine and algorithm - both enhanced to improve their performance
• Microsoft.NET Framework for data mining.

The ones listed above, in each paragraph of the article, definitely are important, nonetheless - from the end-user's point of view - the most meaningful seems to be the fact that the SQL Server Analysis Services solution truly is easy to use. It's all because of the tight integration with Microsoft Office which most of us know very well. No complicated knowledge but the bases of MS Excel are needed to access multidimensional data, for instance. The same is to other appliances. Performance management, on the other hand, can be driven from within Microsoft SharePoint Server, and the further examples truly are numerous. What it means in practice is that even those least experienced users couldn't have any difficulties with working with Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services. And it's another argument for picking up the Redmond Giant's solution instead of any other.

Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services resources:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/... - here is where quite a comprehensive overview of SQL Server Analysis Services can be downloaded from. Even though Microsoft specialists published it on December, 2007, almost all its aspects remain up to date. All the capabilities of the solution are explained clearly and - additionally - illustrated from time to time, what makes them even easier to understand. By the way, Microsoft is probably the only vendor who publish data sheets as Word documents instead of PDF files, but that is just a technical detail.

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/solutions-technologies/business-intelligence/analysis-services.aspx - here is a part of Microsoft official website, devoted to SQL Server and focused especially on Analysis Services solution. Basically, there is all the information which one could consider useful - features, benefits, examples, so on and so forth. Additionally, one can find there a chance to download the trial version of the solution or - if sure - place an order for a full version.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Analysis_Services - even Wikipedia hasn't forget about Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services. Unlike the official website by the vendor, it adds the contextual background to the information so that it's a place where one could find something about the history of SQL Server and - particularly - Analysis Services product. Besides the history, there is some attention paid to storage modes, APIs and object models, and query languages as well. Even though in most cases Wikipedia is considered the last source one should visit to find reliable information, the article about the Analysis Services doesn't lack anything.