Analysis Services Component Tools
Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Analysis Services provides three component tools you can use with your custom applications. You can use any combination of these tools to create applications that help you manage your Analysis Services installation and provide OLAP data to your end users.
DSO
Decision Support Objects (DSO) exposes the object model for the Analysis server. Your applications can use DSO to control and automate functionality on the server. You can also create and maintain OLAP objects such as cubes, dimensions, and roles.
The DSO object model consists of interfaces, objects, collections, methods, and properties. You create and manipulate DSO objects to manage the meta data for OLAP data. This meta data is stored in a repository in a relational database and is accessed by the Analysis server and DSO.
DSO uses hierarchically arranged groups of objects to define basic elements of OLAP data. These basic elements include databases, dimensions, cubes, partitions, aggregations, and virtual cubes. DSO addresses these basic elements in a hierarchical structure where elements contain other elements in a tree, with the server at the root of the tree. You can observe the hierarchy of this structure in the Analysis Manager tree pane.
Your application can use DSO in combination with other component tools of Analysis Services to enhance, augment, and automate your Analysis Services installation.
You can develop your DSO applications in Microsoft Visual Basic® and other languages that support the Component Object Model (COM). The DSO object model was developed in Visual Basic and is easiest to use with that language.
For more information, see Decision Support Objects.
Add-ins Interface and Objects
You can create applications that interact with and enhance the Analysis Services user interface. Analysis Manager can call various routines in your application in response to user activity in the user interface. Your add-in can add nodes to the structure in the tree pane as the user selects or expands a node; it can also augment node menus with items that cause your program to be called when those items are selected. Multiple custom add-ins can be registered and operating at the same time.
The Analysis Manager user interface is implemented as an add-in and is called by the Analysis Services Add-in Manager in the same way that your custom add-in will be called.
Your add-in can use other Analysis Services component tools to enhance, augment, and automate your Analysis Services installation.
For more information about creating and registering your add-ins, see Add-ins.
PivotTable Service
PivotTable® Service, which is included with Analysis Services, is an OLE DB provider that supports the optional OLE DB for OLAP extensions. It functions as a connection interface with cache management functionality to Analysis Services to support client application access to OLAP data.
PivotTable Service is also an in-process desktop Analysis server designed to provide offline data analysis, cube building, and functionality to manipulate data. PivotTable Service stores data locally on the client for offline analysis and offers connectivity to the multidimensional data managed by Analysis Services, other OLE DB-compliant providers, and to non-OLAP relational data sources.
PivotTable Service supports OLE DB Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) as its native consumer interface, and a subset of SQL. PivotTable Service also extends the language defined in OLE DB by adding data definition language (DDL) and data manipulation language (DML) statements to define the structure of local multidimensional data cubes.
Your applications that use PivotTable Service to communicate with the Analysis server or to manage local cubes can use OLE DB interfaces for C++ or Microsoft ActiveX® Data Objects (ADO) and ADO (Multidimensional) (ADO MD) with any COM automation language, including Visual Basic.
You can use PivotTable Service with OLE DB-compliant data sources or ODBC-compliant data sources. PivotTable Service supports the following relational database products:
- SQL Server version 7.0 and earlier and SQL Server 2000
- Microsoft Access 97 and later
- Oracle versions 7.3 and 8.0