Schema Rowsets
In OLE DB, the schema for an object is a description of the object's structure (that is, the contents of that object's meta data). A schema rowset is an OLE DB rowset that encapsulates that description for all objects of particular type within the database. Each row in the rowset corresponds to an individual object. The individual properties of the objects contained in the rowset are contained within the columns of the rowset.
In addition to the columns returned by the schema rowset, OLE DB provides a mechanism, called a restriction column, for filtering these schema rowsets based upon the content of certain columns. For each schema rowset, a set of restriction columns is specified; the client application can use these columns to filter the results of the schema rowset. When more than one restriction column is specified for a schema rowset, the columns are combined using a logical AND statement. For instance, if a user is interested only in dimensions that are contained within the Sales cube of the FoodMart 2000 database, the client application can set the CATALOG_NAME restriction column to equal "FoodMart 2000" and the CUBE_NAME restriction column to equal "Sales".
Schema rowsets used for online analytical processing (OLAP) are documented in the OLE DB specification. Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Analysis Services provides additional rowsets and additional columns for some specified rowsets to provide functionality beyond that addressed in the OLE DB specification. For information about the schema rowsets used by Analysis Services for OLAP, see the OLE DB documentation and OLAP Schema Rowsets.
Schema rowsets used for data mining are documented in the OLE DB for Data Mining specification. All data mining schema rowsets implemented by Analysis Services in this release are described in this documentation, regardless of whether they are also documented in the new OLE DB for Data Mining specification. For information about the schema rowsets used by Analysis Services for data mining, see Data Mining Schema Rowsets.
A C++ header file, Msmd.h, contains the GUIDs for the schema rowsets that are supported in Analysis Services beyond those defined in OLE DB. Msmd.h is installed with Analysis Services samples. The default installation folder is C:\Program Files\Analysis Services\Samples\Include.
For more information about OLE DB schema rowsets, search on "OLE DB schema rowsets" in the Platform SDK portion of the MSDN® library at Microsoft Web site.