Is SSAS best practice for reporting where webapplication uses WCF(framework) , Silverlight , HTML ?

Question

Hello all ,

In my project we are having web apps in UI in silverlight , framwork in WCF and framework used stored procedure to read-write data  in to sql 2005.

Now we want to use SSAS for reporting . Is this best practice to use SSAS for reporting ?

Also want to know how we can use SSAS cube to exctract data from framework (WCF).

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--Rahul D Database Developer

Answer 1

Using SSAS as a data source for reporting is a great idea, IF you are reporting off of highly aggregated data. Think of SSAS as a special type of database. You tell it "these are the values I want to total up" and "here are all the ways I might want to look at those totals".

For example, let's say you are looking at sales of toilet paper for a grocery store chain that has stores all over the world. If you tried to add up the individual sales for each store for each state for each country, you'd kill a traditional SQL Server database.

SSAS will let you add all these totals up ahead of time so you can "slice and dice", quickly seeing sums by store, or by brand name, or by country, or by any combination of those. It's also great for looking at trends (totals over a time period).

You can read up more on SSAS at Microsoft's website (this link is to the 2005 version since that's what you indicated in your question). http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms175609(v=SQL.90).aspx

I'm not sure I understand your second question. WCF is a communications framework for handling security into ASP.NET applications (general services). What data is there in WCF to extract?

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Robert C Cain, MVP MCTS

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