So you have several cubes to build and perhaps wondering what is the best way to build and deploy your cubes. Should you build all the cubes within the same Analysis Service database or create one database per cube? The following guidelines might help you to choose the best approach to build and deploy your SSAS cubes. Continue Reading
Dimension Data Security
SSAS: Using AMO to Secure Analysis Service Cube
Analysis Management Objects (AMO) opens up the object model of SSAS cube for programming. With a bit of .NET programing, AMO can be effectively used to automate administration tasks. Securing the cube is one such task that can be easily automated using AMO. The rest of this post explains how to automate cube security using AMO. Continue Reading
SSAS: Consider Cube Browsing when Building Role Playing Dimensions
A Role Playing Dimensions reuses its definition to represent same concept in different contexts. Common example of Role Playing Dimension is date dimension. For instance, date dimension can be used to represent order date, delivery date and shipment date. Currency, staff, organisation hierarchy are other dimensions that are usually role played. While Role Playing Dimensions promote dimension reuse and share dimension data security, the effect on cube browsing must also be considered. Continue Reading
Analysis Service (SSAS) Vs. PowerPivot
This post compares Analysis Services and PowerPivot. Continue Reading…
SSAS: Membership in Multiple Roles Could Throw Unexpected Surprises
Analysis Service supports role based model to secure cube data. Data can be secured at object level, cell level (Cell Data Access) and at member level (Dimension Data Access). There are relative merits of each approach, which isn’t the topic of this post but more details can be found here. A user can be a member of more than one role and it is important to understand the behaviour of Analysis Services role permissions in such a scenario. Analysis Services role permissions are additive in nature. This means if you are a member of a role that has been granted access to an Analysis Service object; you have access to that object even if you belong to another role which denies access to the same object. In other word the least restrictive roles permissions override the most restrictive role permissions. This could throw some nasty surprises that you never expected.
Continue ReadingSecuring Role Playing Dimensions in Analysis Services
In Analysis Services, dimension data can be secured at either Shared Dimension or Cube Dimension. A Shared Dimension is an object of Analysis Service Database which is available to all the cubes in the database. The Cube Dimension on the other hand is an object of the cube and is an instance of the Common Dimension which is available only to a specific cube
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Cell Data Access Vs Dimension Data Access in Analysis Services
Analysis Services security model is role based. Within a role, the cube data can be secured by either Cell data or Dimension data. In this post, I compare the relative merits of each method.
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Benny Austin 