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ASP.NET as a Client for Business Intelligence
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Building Cubes:
Modeling multidimensional data facilitates online business analysis and query
performance. Analysis Manager provides facility to turn data stored in relational
databases and warehouse into meaningful, easy-to-navigate business information by
creating a data cube. Analysis Services 2000 provides wizards to create cubes, their measures and the dimensions. Also cubes can be optimized to improve query performance and response time.
MDX Query:
Based on the reports that are required the MDX query should be build.
Example: Following MDX query measures for the stores summarized for the states of
California and Washington.
SELECT Measures.MEMBERS ON COLUMNS,
{[Store].[Store State].[CA].CHILDREN,
[Store].[Store State].[WA].CHILDREN} ON ROWS
FROM [Sales]
This query could be tested using the sample MDX application that comes with the SQL
Server 2000 Analysis Services. The results may look like this:
Building the ASP.NET web presentation interface:
There are two ways to build the interface for reports. They could either be developed
using web components or by developing custom HTML interface. The usage of web
components has a disadvantage that the component should be available on the client side
browser (I developed this on IE 5.5).
Developing presentation interface using web component:
Office Web Components (OWC) are Microsoft ActiveX® controls that deliver the
functionality of Excel spreadsheets, charts, and Microsoft PivotTable® and Microsoft
PivotChart® technology in a Web environment. These controls can be embedded in Web
pages and Web-based applications to facilitate flexible, customizable business
intelligence solutions. Office Web Components could be used to publish interactive data
to the intranet, perform sophisticated analysis in a Web browser, or retrieve data from the
intranet for local use. The main feature of the OWC is that it has a highly customizable
interface and contains a Chart and a Pivot table component that helps in performing
adhoc analysis.
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