Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
COM UDFs vs .NET Assemblies
Analysis Services supports COM UDF primarily due to backward compatibility
because there might be several existing applications using it in production. If
you are migrating your Analysis Services 2000 databases containing COM
UDFs to Analysis Services 2005 using the migration wizard and need existing
applications to utilize UDFs, we recommend using the COM UDFs. If you are
very passionate about COM UDFs, you can develop your UDFs as COM librar-
ies. However, COM is being deprecated in Analysis Services 2005, which
means that the support for COM UDFs might not be available in future ver-
sions. COM UDFs are best suited for applications that do not need significant
fine-grain security considerations. Hence we recommend you use COM UDFs
only if it is absolutely essential due to backward compatability or for very spe-
cial circumstances in which you are unable to develop your UDFs in .NET lan-
guages.
Even if you have COM UDFs in your Analysis Services implementation, you
might be able to port these to .NET using VB.Net. We highly recommend that
you use .NET languages for UDFs. Analysis Services 2005 has been architec-
ted to leverage maximum benefits of the .NET framework and provides the de-
velopers the best aspects of .NET languages, such as the memory manage-
ment and garbage collection technology provided by .NET languages coupled
with fine-grain security settings for the assemblies provided by Analysis Ser-
vices 2005. If you are already familiar with .NET languages, that is great. If not,
seriously consider ramping up and learning at least one .NET language. That
ramp-up time will be time well spent. We don't recommend that you attempt to
learn a new programming paradigm under some tight development schedule. If
you have fine-grain security considerations associated with your business ap-
plication, then use .NET assemblies. Note that if you will want to perform cus-
tom operations on your multidimensional data on your Analysis Services in-
stance using the ADOMD Server Object model, you will have to use the dot
Net languages to check stored procedures.
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