Hi folks,



Happy holidays!



Want some comments from you gays.



In short, if I want to create detail data report, is OLAP still good? Or I
need keep relational database to do that?



I am evaluating some OLAP products, one thing I think important is that we
not only need higher level summarized report, but also we need detail data
pull from OLAP data warehouse. Not through drilldown, but we want to pull
detail data into Excel directly.



I know that OLAP is very fast to pull high level summarized data, because
when we build the cube, the OLAP engine has already calculated the figures.



Is Analysis Service still good for pulling detail data into Excel with high
performance? Or I still need relational database to keep the detail data.
Then if the user want the higher level data, I pull from OLAP, if they want
detail data, then I should pull from relational database?



Any comments are welcome.



Thank you!



George

If you use SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services, the drillthrough capacity is
already included such that you can drillthrough to the detail data just as
long as you have a measure and/or attribute already defined for it (you can
check my blog at
http://spaces.msn.com/members/denster/Blog/cns!1pvF91EMBBNxnTGlLGUgGehg!296.entry
for an example on drillthrough).

You could always do it where you have aggregate information in OLAP and
drillthrough to the SQL data directly for details. This is the option
automatically provided in SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services and/or you could
always build your own code to "cellset-to-SQL statement". But with the
latest version of Analysis Services, you can use it for both aggregate and
detail reports.

--
HTH!
Denny Lee
<dennyglee_at_hotmail_dot_com>

Blog at:: http://spaces.msn.com/members/denster/



"George Meng" <georgemeng2000 (AT) sohu (DOT) com> wrote