November 6, 2013 at 3:08 am
I have been learning SSAS and actually been through 2 books. One question though is how the SSAS actually get used? I have seen it used in Excel, or SSRS by accessing the cubes built in SSAS. Excel approach looks pretty useless to me, you can't give the excel to another people outside the LAN to access the cube. Is there something like SSAS web server that can be accessed from a browser like report manger of SSRS and then you can dynamically drag measures and dimensions to do the analysis like what you do in the cube browser in BIDS.
I know you can build a SSRS report on SSAS cubes so that the report can be accessed by Internet. But SSRS reports have fixed row and column definition so it's not flexible for analysis (not as flexible as what you can do with cube browser in BIDS).
Why SSAS doesn't provide similar thing. I mean it already has the cube browser for preview in BIDS. Is it how SSAS supposed to work (must work with Excel or SSRS)?
November 6, 2013 at 3:42 am
There are literally dozens of products out there that will do what you need, google is your friend 😀
Sticking "in-house" with microsoft apps, in sharepoint (2010 and up) there is a thing called PerformancePoint with which you can do interactive analysis and decomposition trees. You can also publish interactive excel pages using Excel Services.
Furthermore in stand alone excel (providing you set the users permissions in an SSAS role) users can create an offline cube based on what they have in a pivot for offline use when they are not connected to a network. Saying browsing SSAS cubes in excel is "useless" is a little unfair - it's actually a great way of browsing a cube and good for users too. When transitioning BI into a more "self-service" environment then user buy-in is often the hardest part of the project. Having the ability to use something they are familiar with (excel) goes a long way to getting the acceptance you need.
November 6, 2013 at 4:23 am
Thanks for the reply. That's very helpful. But I still think it would be fantastic if SSAS had the ability of online browsing/analysis by itself.
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