An OLAP Report Review: Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2005: Industry Report

An OLAP Report Review: Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2005

Product Type: Market Research Report
Published by: BARC
Published: February 2007
Product Code: R3485-8

Description

Nigel Pendse's review of Microsoft's mass market OLAP server now includes previews of Katmai (SQL Server 2008) and PerformancePoint - the financial analytical application scheduled for release in late 2007

Although more than two years later to market than Microsoft had originally announced, SQL Server & Analysis Services 2005 have represented a significant advance on the previous releases in many areas. For example, data access capabilities, including from relational sources, have improved greatly.

This review evaluates the extended scope of Analysis Services including:

Its close integration with SQL Server 2005
Improved security features
Extended time-series intelligence.

It also explores the implications of the replacement of Data Transformation Services by Integration Services, and explains other new features including the move of MDX calculations from the client to the server and the resulting scalability characteristics.

Although Analysis Services offers a greater scalability and new features, the review warns that it is now a much more technical product than its predecessor making the product more suitable for professional developers, rather than end users.

Among high-scoring features, the review describes its database structural flexibility, security and multi-user capabilities. There is also an assessment of its relatively low scoring performance in respect of its portability support and exception alerting. Despite the market leading position of this product, beware of problems with patchy local support provided by Microsoft for multidimensional technology.

Please note: The report file is password protected. Password will be delivered with PDF file. The PDF file may not be saved, however, one hard copy may be printed.

Table of Contents

1. Vendor overview
2. Microsoft, ProClarity & PerformancePoint
3. Microsoft's OLAP origins
4. Product commercial issues
5. Pricing
6. Market share
7. Katmai (SQL Server 2008) preview
8. Database structure and capacity
9. Data write-back
10. Architecture and platforms
11. Data access functionality
12. Calculation functionality
13. Aggregations
14. KPIs
15. Reporting flexibility
16. Cube Analysis Excel add-in
17. Automatic detection of exceptions and data mining
18. Time series intelligence
19. Currency support
20. Security and DBMS issues
21. End-user human factors
22. Application building features
23. Performance
24. Conclusions and scores

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