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

Analysis Services security features


Analysis Services provides a rich set of security features that allow us to control every aspect of how a user can interact with a cube. In this section we'll describe how Analysis Services security actually works, and the different types of permission you can grant to a user.

Roles and role membership

Analysis Services uses roles to manage security. A role is a security group, and users have to be members of one or more roles in order to access the cube. We can grant a role the right to access any cube object or perform any administrative task.

Given our requirements, we will need to create several roles. We will need to create roles to secure countries, so we'll have one role for French users which only allows access to data from France, one for Canadian users that only grants access to Canadian data, and so on. Similarly we will also need to have one role for each reseller who is to access the cube. This may mean, of course, that we end up having a large...