Book Image

Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services

Book Image

Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services

Overview of this book

Microsoft's SQL Server Analysis Services 2008 is an OLAP server that allows users to analyze business data quickly and easily. However, designing cubes in Analysis Services can be a complex task: it's all too easy to make mistakes early on in development that lead to serious problems when the cube is in production. Learning the best practices for cube design before you start your project will help you avoid these problems and ensure that your project is a success. This book offers practical advice on how to go about designing and building fast, scalable, and maintainable cubes that will meet your users' requirements and help make your Business Intelligence project a success. This book gives readers insight into the best practices for designing and building Microsoft Analysis Services 2008 cubes. It also provides details about server architecture, performance tuning, security, and administration of an Analysis Services solution. In this book, you will learn how to design and implement Analysis Services cubes. Starting from designing a data mart for Analysis Services, through the creation of dimensions and measure groups, to putting the cube into production, we'll explore the whole of the development lifecycle. This book is an invaluable guide for anyone who is planning to use Microsoft Analysis Services 2008 in a Business Intelligence project.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Data security


There are three different types of data security that we can implement: we can grant members of a role the permission to access entire cubes; and we can control access to data within a cube by granting or denying access to individual cells (Cell Security) or individual members on dimension hierarchies (Dimension Security).

Granting read access to cubes

Before a user can access any data in a cube, they need to be a member of a role that has Read permissions on that cube. A role can be granted Read permission on a cube by selecting Read on the Access dropdown box next to the cube name on the Cubes tab of the Role Editor.

If we have set up writeback on our cube, we can also control whether the Role can write data back to the cube by granting the Read/Write permission instead. Last of all, if we want members of the role to be able to run Drillthrough queries and create local cubes, we can grant permission to do this by choosing the appropriate option from the Local Cube/Drillthrough...