PivotTable Service

PivotTable® Service is the primary interface for applications interacting with Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Analysis Services. It is used to build client applications that interact with multidimensional data. PivotTable Service also provides methods for online and offline data mining analysis of multidimensional data and relational data. PivotTable Service is included as part of Analysis Services, and it can be redistributed by third-party client applications.

PivotTable Service is the primary method for interacting with Analysis Services in order to accomplish such tasks as connecting to a cube or data mining model, querying a cube or data mining model, and retrieving schema information.

As a stand-alone provider, PivotTable Service provides client applications with the ability to create local cube files and mining models from relational and multidimensional sources. Client applications can connect to a local cube and execute queries using Multidimensional Expressions (MDX) without interacting with the full-scale Analysis server.

PivotTable Service can be used in a variety of development environments. Both Microsoft Visual Basic® and Visual C++® developers can use either the Microsoft ActiveX® Data Objects (Multidimensional) (ADO MD) object library or the OLE DB for OLAP Component Object Model (COM) interfaces to create client applications.

Intended Audience

This document is intended for developers who are interested in developing client applications that work with Analysis Services. Readers should be familiar with online analytical processing (OLAP) and the structure of multidimensional data (cubes), and MDX. Knowledge of data mining theory and practice is also helpful. Additionally, knowledge of either C++ or a COM Automation language, such as Microsoft Visual Basic, is required.

COM Automation programmers should have some knowledge of programming using ActiveX components and ADO. Programmers using C++ should be well versed in OLE DB and COM. All programmers should be able to work with SQL, including the data definition language (DDL) and data manipulation language (DML) extensions defined by Transact-SQL.

Readers developing data mining applications should be familiar with the OLE DB for Data Mining specification, which includes detailed information about standard mining models, OLE DB for Data Mining grammar, query syntax, schema rowsets, prediction functions, special histogram nested table columns, and mining model XML format (PMML). The OLE DB for Data Mining specification is available for download from the Microsoft OLE DB Web page at the Microsoft Web site.

For more information about using ADO, see the ADO documentation.

For more information about using OLE DB in Microsoft Visual C++, see the OLE DB documentation.

For more information about Transact-SQL, see Transact-SQL Overview.

For more information about MDX, see MDX.