Loading Data from a Relational Database - Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services - page 306

Analysis Services 2008 supports reading data from the following:

. SQL Server 7.0, 2000, 2005, 2008

. Microsoft Access

. Oracle

. Teradata

. DB2

. Sybase

. Informix

Analysis Services supports OLE DB providers and .NET managed providers. If you create a
data source object in Business Intelligence Development Studio (BI Dev Studio; discussed
in Chapter 9, “Multidimensional Models and Business Intelligence Development Studio”),
you can select the appropriate provider in the Connection Manager dialog box of the Data
Source editor.

Data Source Objects

A data source object is the Analysis Services object that defines where the data comes from.
It defines which client library is loaded, and it defines the connection string for establish-
ing the connection. It also defines the credentials for establishing the connection. In
short, the data source object defines all the things necessary for establishing a connection
to a source of data.

DataSource is a major object; it has ID and Name properties. You can create and edit the
DataSource object independently from other objects. The most important information
defined by the DataSource object is ConnectionString . It defines properties that the client
library (OLEDB or ADO.NET provider) uses to establish a connection to the source of data.
The ConnectionString property defines the name of the provider (the client library used
to establish the connection), the name of the server that contains the database, the name
of the database, and others.

Data Source Object Properties

Table 17.1 describes the properties of a data source object.

Listing 17.1 shows sample DDL (Data Definition Language) for a data source object that
establishes a connection to a local SQL Server located on the local computer, using
FoodMart 2008 as the database.