An OLAP cube is a data structure that overcomes the
limitations of relational databases by providing rapid analysis of data. Cubes can display and sum large amounts of data while also
providing users with searchable access to any data points. This way, the data
can be rolled up, sliced, and diced as needed to handle the widest variety of
questions that are relevant to a user’s area of interest.
Software vendors or information technology (IT)
developers with a working knowledge of OLAP cubes can create management packs
to define their own extensible and customizable OLAP cubes that are built on the data
warehouse infrastructure that was provided in Service Manager 2010.
These cubes are stored in
SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS). Self-service business
intelligence tools such as Excel and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)
can target these cubes in SSAS, and you can use them to analyze the data from
multiple perspectives.
The databases that business users to store all its
transactions and records are called online transaction processing (OLTP)
databases. These databases usually have records that are entered one at a time
and that contain a wealth of information that can be used by strategists to
make informed decisions about their business.
The databases that are used to store the data,
however, were not designed for analysis. Therefore, retrieving answers from
these databases is costly in terms of time and effort. OLAP databases are
specialized databases that are designed to help extract this business intelligence information from the data.
In Service Manager 2010, the data warehouse
provided OLAP databases that contained data in simplified, read-optimized
schemas that were ready for consumption. The topology of the system is shown in the following
illustration.
One drawback to this system, however, is that OLAP
databases essentially contained the exact same type of information that was
found in OLTP databases. There were no pre-calculated aggregations of data to
answer increasingly complex and varied queries.
OLAP cubes can be considered as the final piece of the
puzzle for a data warehousing solution. An OLAP cube, also known as
multidimensional cube or hyper cube, is a data structure in
SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) that is built, using OLAP
databases, to allow near-instantaneous analysis of data. The topology of this
system is shown in the following illustration.
The useful feature of an OLAP cube is that the data in the cube
can be contained in an aggregated form. To the user, the cube seems to have the
answers in advance because assortments of values are already precomputed.
Without having to query the source OLAP database, the cube can return
answers for a wide range of questions almost instantaneously.
The main goal of
System Center 2012 – Service Manager OLAP cubes is to
give software vendors or information technology (IT) developers the ability to
perform near-instantaneous analysis of data for both historical analysis and
trending purposes.
System Center 2012 – Service Manager does this by:
- Allowing you to define OLAP cubes in management packs that will be created automatically in SSAS when the management pack is deployed.
- Automatically maintaining the cube without user intervention, performing such tasks as processing, partitioning, translations and localization, and schema changes.
- Allowing users to use self-service business intelligence tools, such as Excel, to analyze the data from multiple perspectives.
- Saving generated Excel reports for future reference.
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