Leveraging Performance Point Services - Microsoft Business Intelligence Tools for Excel Analysts - page 307

Figure 16-2: The PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer.

Adding a data connection
You can think of PerformancePoint as a user interface layer between the dashboard users and the
business intelligence data infrastructure, which is a data source.

PerformancePoint is designed to use Analysis Services cubes as data sources in an effi-
cient way, and although this is common, PerformancePoint can also use other types of
data sources, including relational databases and Excel documents.

Note

In PerformancePoint, you configure data sources manually in the Dashboard Designer as data con-
nections . A PerformancePoint data connection is a small configuration file with information about an
underlying data source, making it possible for reports, filters, and other PerformancePoint compo-
nents to leverage that data source. After they're set up, data connections remain in the
PerformancePoint library and you can reuse them across many dashboards.