First Look at Analysis Services 2005 - Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX - page 84

Metadata level. Roles are discussed with the help of a scenario in
Chapter 19 .
▪ Assemblies: You learned earlier in this chapter that assemblies are
actually stored procedures (created with CLR or COM-based pro-
gramming languages) used on the server side for custom operations.
If you are familiar with Analysis Services 2000 and the UDF (User-
Defined Function), note that assemblies can do anything the UDF
can do and more. Also note that COM UDFs in Analysis Services
2000 form are also supported in Analysis Services 2005 for back-
wards compatibility of existing applications. The scope of these as-
semblies is OLAP database-specific; that is, an assembly can only
operate on the database for which it is run.
▪ Server Assemblies: If you want to operate on multiple databases in
Analysis Services, you have to create this sort of object, the server
assembly. Server assemblies are virtually the same as assemblies,
except their scope is increased; they work across databases in Ana-
lysis Services.