Administrative permissions can be granted at two levels in Analysis Services: at the server level and at the database level. To become an Analysis Services server administrator, a user must be a member of the special, server-wide administrators role. Users can be added to this role when Analysis Services is installed, or by right-clicking on an instance in the Object Explorer pane in SQL Management Studio, selecting Properties on the menu, and going to the Security page in the Analysis Services Properties dialog. Server administrators have no restrictions on what they can do; also, certain tasks, such as creating databases, can only be performed by server administrators. As a result, it's likely that we'll have to be a member of this role while we're developing our cube.

Database-level administrative permissions are granted in the database roles we've just been introduced to in the preceding sections. By checking the Full Control box on the General tab, we can grant...