Administering Analysis Services - Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX - page 617

HTTP Connectivity to Analysis Services
We expect customers would want to expose the data from Analysis Services to
the end users through web application. Analysis Services 2000 supported data
access from the Web through a component called DATA PUMP. Analysis Ser-
vices 2005 uses a similar architecture to support data access for Web applica-
tions. The PUMP component needs to be loaded within Internet Information
Server (IIS) as an ISAPI dll. In order to provide web access to data from Ana-
lysis Services you need to configure your IIS appropriately. You need to set up
virtual directories, copy appropriate DLLs provided by Analysis Services 2005
and setup appropriate permission on IIS so that users can access data from
Analysis Services. The PUMP does not necessarily have to be setup on the
same machine as Analysis Services. Using Analysis Services 2005 you can
configure several data PUMPs to be directing queries to various Analysis Ser-
vices instances. Each PUMP has a configuration file where the server name
and certain other properties are configured. In order to access Analysis Ser-
vices data over the web a user would connect to IIS using HTTP. IIS in turn dir-
ects the request to Analysis Services instance over TCP/IP with appropriate
credentials set up on IIS. The architecture of the connection to Analysis Ser-
vices over HTTP is shown in Figure 12-31 .
You can configure security on IIS to either use anonymous connection to Ana-
lysis services, perform username and password authentication on IIS or per-
form windows authentication. The steps for setting up HTTP connectivity using
data PUMP includes configuring your IIS by creating virtual directories and
configuring the PUMP and security for the users. Microsoft has published a
white paper called "Configuring HTTP Access to SQL Server 2005 Analysis
Services on Microsoft Windows XP," Published: July 27, 2005. We recommend
you to go to http://www.microsoft.com , search for the paper with the above
provided title.