Server Architecture

Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Analysis Services provides server capabilities to create and manage OLAP cubes and data mining models, and to provide this data to clients through PivotTable® Service. Server operations include:

• Creating and processing cubes from relational databases, usually in data warehouses.
  
  
• Storing cube data in multidimensional structures, in relational databases, or in combinations of both.
  
  
• Creating data mining models from cubes or from relational databases, usually in data warehouses.
  
  
• Storing data for data mining models in multidimensional structures, relational databases, or in Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML), which is a standardized XML format.

Meta data, the information used to define cubes, data mining models, and other objects on the server, is stored by Meta Data Services in a relational database.

A user interface is provided by the Analysis Manager add-in that runs under a snap-in to Microsoft Management Console (MMC). In addition, the Data Transformation Services (DTS) portion of SQL Server Enterprise Manager, which also snaps into MMC, provides a user interface with the server. Programming interfaces are provided to enable custom applications to interact with the object model that controls the server, as well as with Analysis Manager.

For more information about creating custom programs, see Programming Analysis Services Applications.