Reporting Services - Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX - page 893

Creating Reports Based on a UDM
You have so far seen some capabilities provided by Reporting Services 2005
and how it can facilitate the creation of reports from a relational database. In
Chapter 16 you learned the tight integration of Analysis Services with Integra-
tion Services that helps you load data into Analysis Services and perform ad-
ministrative operations. By adding to those functions, Reporting Services 2005
provides you the ability to create reports from the UDM by which Microsoft's
SQL Server 2005 provides a truly end-to-end business intelligence solution to
the market. Designing reports from Analysis Services 2005 databases is actu-
ally similar to designing reports from a relational database using Reporting
Services 2005.
In the event you have experience with Reporting Services 2000, you will be ex-
cited to know that Reporting Services 2005 contains both new features and ex-
tended capabilities associated with the original feature set.
In Reporting Services 2000, specifying an MDX query and using the OLEDB
provider for Analysis Services to integrate cube-based data into your reports
was about the extent of the integration between the two products. There are
significant improvements on that model; you will find much tighter integration
exists between Reporting Services 2005 and Analysis Services 2005. Specific-
ally, the product now has an MDX query designer, which enables you to re-
trieve data from any UDM through the technique of drag and drop, without you
actually having to understand and write MDX queries. Assuming you worked
through this whole book, you already know some MDX, but in the event you
are a shameless chapter surfer who started here, well, you're in luck.
Some other points more than merit mention here. In the 2000 version, you
could only pass a single parameter to Analysis Services from a Report for dy-
namic report building. For example, you could send a single country name.
Now, you can send a whole list of country names as parameters; this en-
hances what you can accomplish in terms of building dynamic reports. The
ability to retrieve intrinsic properties for dimension members and cells is intact
with 2005, not to mention accessing member and extended properties. You are
sure to love this next one — Reporting Services 2005 takes advantage of ag-
gregated data provided by Analysis Services! This helps increase performance
of report processing — especially when there is a large amount of source
detail-level data (like sales per store) and the report includes aggregations