Connected to an OLE DB Provider

Connected to an OLE DB Provider

It is possible for PivotTable® Service to connect to a relational OLE DB provider directly:

• When retrieving data from a relational OLAP (ROLAP) local cube file
  
  
• When building a local cube file

Retrieving Data from a Local ROLAP Cube

When communicating with a local relational OLAP (ROLAP) cube file, you must have a connection to a relational data provider. The local cube file stores the structural definition of the cube but not actual or precalculated data. To retrieve the data itself, the connection to the tabular data provider is used. This process is transparent to the client application. This transparency results in smaller cubes than are possible using a multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP) storage mode. However, the performance of such a cube is less than that of a local MOLAP cube due to the processing requirements of calculating the aggregate function at run time.

Building Local Cube Files

You can also build a local ROLAP cube file that is based on a relational OLE DB provider by using the DEFER_DATA option in the INSERT INTO statement. Queries that are used to define the local cube file are passed to the data source where they are resolved. The resulting OLE DB recordsets are interpreted by PivotTable Service and used to build the local cube.

See Also

Building Local Cubes

Using DRILLTHROUGH to Retrieve Source Data

INSERT INTO Statement