Introduction
Analysis Services
began as the project of a small Israeli firm named Panorama, which had
responded to a request from a British publishing company to develop an
application that would analyze the data stored in its relational
database. By the end of 1994, Panorama developers began work on a more
general application that would make it possible for business managers to
analyze data with relative ease.
With its first release in
1995, Panorama deployed the application to several dozen customers. As
the next release moved the application more deeply into the Israeli
market, the Panorama team began to develop a new client/server
analytical application. The server would process the data and store it
in a proprietary format, and the client would also offer users an
easy-to-use, rich graphical interface.
By 1996, the application had
come to the attention of Microsoft, which acquired the technology by the
end of that same year. In early 1997, a small Panorama team comprised
of Alexander Berger, Amir and Ariel Netz, Edward Melomed, and Mosha
Pasumansky moved from Tel Aviv to Redmond to start work on the first
version of Microsoft OLAP Server. After the move to the United States,
the team added new developers Irina Gorbach and Py Bateman.
To make the
application attractive to enterprise customers, the team took on the
challenge of formalizing and standardizing data exchange protocols, and
they eliminated the client side of the application in favor of
supporting a variety of third-party client applications. In early 1997, a
small group including Alexander Berger retreated to a Puget Sound
island to brainstorm the foundation of what would become SQL Server
Analysis Services.
That retreat produced a
plan for developing a standard protocol for client applications to
access OLAP data: OLEDB for OLAP. More important, and more challenging,
was the plan for developing a new query language that could access
multidimensional data stored in the OLAP server—MDX (Multidimensional
Expressions). MDX is a text language similar to SQL. MDX makes it
possible to work with a multidimensional dataset returned from a
multidimensional cube. From its inception, MDX has continued to change
and improve, and now it is the de facto standard for the industry.
The original release plan
was to include the OLAP server in the 1997 release of SQL Server 6.5.
However, instead of rushing to market, Microsoft decided to give the
development team more time to implement MDX and a new OLEDB for OLAP
provider. Microsoft’s first version of a multidimensional database was
released in 1998 as part of SQL Server 7.0. That version was integrated
with Microsoft Excel PivotTables, the first client for the new server.
Under the slogan,
“multidimensionality for the masses,” this new multidimensional database
from Microsoft opened the market for multidimensional applications to
companies of all sizes. The new language and interface were greeted
favorably. The simplicity (and, one could say, elegance) of the design
made it possible for users to rapidly become proficient with the new
product, including users who weren’t database experts. Technology that
used to be available only to large corporations was now accessible to
medium-sized and small businesses. As a result, the market for new
applications that use multidimensional analysis has expanded and
flourished in an environment rich with developers who write those
applications.
But, of course, we were not
satisfied to rest on our laurels. We took on a new goal—turn Analysis
Services into a new platform for data warehousing. To achieve this, we
introduced new types of dimensions, increased the volume of data the
server can process, and extended the calculation model to be more robust
and flexible. Even though no additional personnel joined the team for
this effort, by the end of 1999 we brought the new and improved Analysis
Services 2000 to market.
For the next five years,
more and more companies adopted Analysis Services until it became a
leader in the multidimensional database market, garnering a 27% market
share. Now, multidimensional databases running on OLAP servers are
integral to the IT infrastructures of companies of all sizes. In
response to this wide adoption of multidimensional database technology,
Microsoft has increased the size of the team devoted to OLAP technology
in order to continue to develop the platform to meet the requirements of
enterprise customers.
For the 2005
release of SQL Server Analysis Services, we started from ground up,
rewriting the original (and now aging) code base. We built enterprise
infrastructure into the core of the server.
SQL Server 2008 release
continues to improve architecture and functionality of Analysis
Services. While improving the performance of query execution, it also
introduces query language extensions and new management capabilities.
Who Is This Book’s Intended Audience?
In this book, we bring you
the tools you need to fully exploit Analysis Services and explain the
architecture of the system. You’ll find all of the coverage of our
previous book (just in case you were wondering if you needed to go back
and read that one first), including the basic architecture established
in Analysis Services 2005, as well as all the improvements introduced in
Analysis Services 2008. Analysis Services Unleashed
gives you a full understanding of multidimensional analysis and the MDX
query language. It also exposes all the aspects of designing
multidimensional applications and management of the system. | 
