Business Intelligent is a concept. The users will not find a single product called Business Intelligent in Microsoft products’ stacks instead of Business Intelligent in Microsoft is formed by using various sets of Microsoft’s services and products.
Business Intelligent can be viewed as a 3-tiers application by its nature. It needs the backend, the middle-tiered and with the User Interface (UI). Microsoft SQL Server, since 2005 has been come up with the complete tiers for Business Intelligent. Database Engine is the backend of the tier, Analysis Services will fall under the middle-tier and lastly the Reporting Services can be served as the UI in order to deliver information to the appropriate business users.
Reporting Services is not the only UI tool that can deliver information to the users. There is another famous product of Microsoft Office’s product can be used to retrieve the information from the middle-tier of Business Intelligent, Excel. Excel is presents in the form of pivot table, and it can be used for Business Intelligent UI and reporting. Users can basically form their reports by drag and drop the items (dimension and measure) to the pivot table.
ASP.NET is uncommon method to build up the UI for Business Intelligent. In order to customize the UI in ASP.NET, a developer is definitely needed. The developers not only need the skill of ASP.NET but as well as ADOMD.NET (ADO Multidemension) with Microsoft.AnalysisServices.AdomdClient namespace.
Some of the advanced users will expect “here come the AdventureDW”. Yes, you are right. AdventureDW has the most samples built for Visual Studio 2005 Business Intelligence Project. Unfortunately, in term of ADOMD or ADOMD.NET, I found many samples using Foodmart 2000 that came with MS SQL 2000. Even worse that I could only get the Foodmart database for Analysis Services (cube or abf) but I cannot the source database (mdf).
MS SQL 2008 is rather new so I will prefer to use MS SQL 2005 (Developer Edition) to get it started. Business Intelligence’s samples will not be installed by default even you choose Advance Options during MS SQL 2005 installation. To install the Business Intelligence’s sample after the complete installation of MS SQL 2005, you can do the followings:
1. Click the Start -> All Programs -> Microsoft SQL Server 2005 -> Documentation and Tutorials -> Samples -> Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Samples (English)
To move your first step:
1. Click the Start -> All Programs -> Microsoft SQL Server 2005 -> SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio
2. File -> Open -> Project/Solution…
3. Open Analysis Services Tutorial.sln from C:Program FilesMicrosoft SQL Server90SamplesAnalysis ServicesTutorialsLesson4
4. Right click the solution Analysis Services Tutorial -> Deploy
5. Open Analysis Services Tutorial.cube click Browser tag.
You should be able to drag the dimension to the viewer now.
Resources:
Microsoft Business Intelligence Overview
Analysis Services Developer InfoCenter
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175633.aspx
Chanmingman's Blog 