Hi,

I'm new to OLAP and I'm looking into the pro's and con's. My users would
most likely use Excel 2000 to analyse the end result. So what are the main
differences, advantages, disadvantages or using OLAP vs connecting to
relational data and building a pivot table based on this?

The main ones I can see are speed and performance of analysing lots of data
very quickly. Also the ability to expose a cube which contains the business
logic and relational constraints rather than leave the end user to work these
out or worse make incorrect aggregations and assumptions.

Anything else?

there is a lot of differences
first its a server; so a central repository where the business rules are
stored and available to all users.
second the OLAP server allow you to create dimensions and hierarchies to
organize your data.
after this...
the server support the distinct coutn measure, calculated measures, virtual
cubes (to bring data from 2 cubes (or more) into 1 logical cube; providing
"cross analysis" capabilities)

the performance is better because you can preaggregate the cubes on the
server and the server cache the data on the server side.

if we talk about AS2005 there is far more improvement; but the current
pivottable don't provides a good interface to access these features. Office
12 solves this.

its just an overview.

"Neil" <Neil (AT) discussions (DOT) microsoft.com> wrote

Hi Jeje,

Thanks for the info. I'm on board with the benefits of storing business
logic in the cube, pre-aggregating etc

I guess the final question is how is it better for the end user from a point
of view of analysis. Is there anything you can do in the pivottable when
connecting to analysis services that you can't do when you just connect to a
couple of relational tables?

Thanks for your help


"Jéjé" wrote: