Apologies for the cross posting, I normally don't however I have a feeling
that the 'warehouseing' newsgroup I orginally posted to was the wrong one.

Hello,
I am going to be a bit cheeky here and ask for some information on Analyst
Services and the like that I have been asked to answer. Unfortunatly I do not
posess the knowledge to do most of this so I was wondering if someone out
there did, or could forward me a web site that could. Anyway here are the
questions.

1. What decides or who decides what physical implementation model to use for
OLAP? From what I've read there seems to be choices about what is pyhiscally
stored and what is referenced either from storage (through some sort of
cache) or from the source fact tables. ROLAP/HOLAP/MOLAP are mentioned at
some point. I'm guessing that this could be important but something that
could be changed as the logical view to the outside world wouldn't change
even if the physical implementation was changed at a later date. However,
having to go back and tune things later on creates a bit of a support
overhead.

2. The beginning of the book mentions concepts such as OLAP databases and
dimension libraries. Is an OLAP database a way of implementing a
datawarehouse for specific contexts such as for particular departments (e.g.
a finance database, a marketing database etc.) or is there something more
subtle to it than that? Similarly, what is the concept of dimension libraries
all about? More importantly, if we don't take an approach that uses these
structures, will we get ourselves into an organisational mess in the longer
term? Currently DNx is used by all parts of the business so the concept of
creating seperate data marts for different purposes doesn't really exist at
Dawson News.

3. Another cocept mentioned at the start of the book is "private" dimensions
that can only be used in certain OLAP cubes or OLAP databases. Whats this all
about? Superficially it seems to be a way of creating dimensions that only
operate in certain contexts which on the face of it seems to be a bit of a
cop out (ie making information meaningful to everybody but then allowing
exceptions when the going gets tough) .

4. This is a simple technical question! Is the OLAP repository in Access
(the default) or have we migrated it over to SQL Server.

5. This is a much bigger question. What is the best way of updating cubes?
One of the problems we've got is that the base table(s) currently in DNx SQL
Server (RTLSAL tables) are a summary so selective fields are incrementally
updated each day. Any ideas how the OLAP refreshes would work in this
specific case? Also, dimensions change from time to time so what is the best
way to ensure that cubes are kept up to date as the "static" data changes?
Its quite important that any data reported against is both non-volatile (ie
update once a day) and current (ie everything in synch).

6. Also linked to 5. but possibly even more genreal, what is DTS capable of?
We currently populate the RTLSAL and other tables using VB scripts which
contain the logic to deternine when to insert new rows and when to udpate
existing ones and what rules to apply when applying updates. Is this
something we could replace with DTS?

Thanks
J