Microsoft® SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services provides unified, fully integrated views of your business data to support online analytical processing (OLAP), key performance indicator (KPI) scorecards, and powerful data mining capabilities. PCA provides SQL Server Analysis Services consulting, design and development services that are

Investments in line-of-business applications frequently leads to reams of disconneted business data that is difficult to correlate and analyze. Traditional approaches to building forward-looking business decision-support systems include: swapping one relational reporting system for another, extracting and transforming the data and building a data warehouse (ETL), or purchasing a new application on the promise of more robust reporting. Too often, these approaches fall short of business needs, and run over budget and schedule expectations. In-house "office grown" solutions can often be more effective (for example, Excel pivot tables), but they are very costly to maintain, and do not scale well for most data gathering and deployment needs.

With the release of Microsoft® SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services, organizations now have a single, consistent solution for reporting against either online transaction processing (OLTP) or online analytical processing (OLAP) data stores. SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services greatly reduces the amount of effort required to provide a consistent view of data that is integrated from an array of disparate applications and formats. Whether the goal is to integrate data from multiple applications into a consistent format, analyze data from a variety of sources, report against this data using a variety of formats and techniques, mine the data for relationships, or forecast future results with predictive analytics, SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services provides a suite of highly integrated tools to help businesses take full advantage of more advanced data analysis solutions.

SQL Reporting	vs.	SQL Analysis
Reporting is descriptive Reporting tracks performance and identifies variation from pre-defined goals Reporting tells you how many there are and where they are now		Analysis is correlative Analysis discovers relationships and dependencies, finds causation, and predicts likely outcomes based upon trends and patterns Analysis tells you where things are going, and provides supporting criterion

Many businesses maintain a number of separate applications for such functions as enterprise resource planning (ERP), CRM, SFA, SCM, Human Resources, and so forth, all from separate vendors with different terminology, data schemas, and database engines. However, business decision makers need to view the data from all these sources in order to make informed decisions. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services addresses this challenge through the use of Data Source Views that allows for the creation of analytical models against the existing data structures. Unified Dimensional Models and Perspectives create a single version of the truth and expose it as virtual data marts to individual departments.

Most warehousing tools today build rigid hierarchical structures to allow analysts and knowledge workers to drill up and down into data. While powerful, drilling up and down is not the only form of analysis that can be performed. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services allows businesses to build solutions that support flexible hierarchies, many-to-many relationships, and other dimension types that allow for more advanced analytics than are available in traditional solutions.

Businesses with operations that span languages must consolidate data into a single language and currency in order for analysis to be valid, but this makes it more difficult for organizations worldwide to use the solution. Thanks to a feature called Translations, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services lets companies build a single solution that can localize values on the fly depending on the user's location.

Most business intelligence and data warehousing solutions are snapshots in time that are updated nightly or weekly. Real-time BI solutions exist but they tend to be very slow compared to snapshots. Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services gives businesses the ability to have real time or near real time BI capabilities with snapshot-like speeds and minimal impact on production systems.