First Look at Analysis Services 2005 - Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX - page 49

hierarchies. Attributes correspond to columns of a dimension table,
and hierarchies are formed by grouping several attributes. For ex-
ample, most cubes have a Time dimension. A Time dimension typic-
ally contains the attributes Year, Month, Date, and Day and a hier-
archy for Year-Month-Date. Sales cubes in particular often contain
Geography dimensions, Customer dimensions, and Product dimen-
sions. You learn about dimensions in Chapter 5 .
▪ Mining Models. Data mining (covered in Chapter 13 ) is the process
of analyzing raw data using algorithms that help discover interesting
patterns not typically found by ad-hoc analysis. Mining Models are
objects that hold information about a dataset after analysis by a spe-
cific algorithm which can be used for analyzing the patterns or pre-
dicting new data sets. Knowing these patterns can help companies
make their business processes more powerful. For example, the
book recommendation feature on http://www.Amazon.com relies on
data mining.
▪ Roles. Roles are objects in a database that are used to control ac-
cess permissions to the database objects (read, write, read/write,
process) for users. If you want to provide only read access to a set of
users you could create a single role that has read access and add all
the users to this role. There can be several roles within a database. If
a user is a member of several roles of a database, the user inherits
the permissions of those roles. If there is a conflict in permissions,
Analysis Services provides the most liberal access to the user. You
learn more about roles in Chapters 12 and 19 .
▪ Assemblies. Assemblies are user-defined functions that can be cre-
ated by using a CLR language such as Visual Basic.NET, Visual C#
.NET, or through languages such as Microsoft Visual Basic or Mi-
crosoft C++ that form Component Object Model (COM) binaries.
These are typically used for custom operations that are needed for
specific business logic and are executed on the server for efficiency
and performance. Assemblies can be added at the server instance
level or within a specific database. The scope of an assembly is lim-
ited to the object to which the assembly has been added. For ex-
ample, if an assembly is added to the server, that assembly can be
accessed within each database on the Server. On the other hand, if