Analysis services and traditional reporting

The idea of defining cubes directly on any relational database is very nice, especially with the possibility of giving "friendly names" to facts and dimensions.

I've read in a few places that analysis services provides "... a unified and integrated view of all your business data as the foundation for your traditional reporting, OLAP analysis and data mining."

I've tested the OLAP and the data mining aspects but I have yet to see how I can use a data source view defined in analysis services (without any cubes associated with it) to do traditional reporting.

I would like to use the "abstraction layer" that the analysis services data source view provides but in a traditional report such as a list of customers with names and addresses but no aggregations, so no cubes.

Is it possible to do "traditional reporting" through a data source view in analysis services (with its friendly names and regional attributes) without defining a cube? If so, how?

Thanks in advance.

Hi Gilles,

You could create a Report Model based on your DSV.

HTH,

Eric

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Thanks for the quick response.

I had noticed that a model would help and succeeded in creating a report from report services that uses the model. However, would I be able to use that same model has a data source from something else other than reporting services such as from within Excel?

What I would like to do is use the data source views in analysis services (again because of the friendly names and so forth) as my one source for all my reporting needs: OLAP, data mining AND traditional reporting, to be used by reporting services AND other reporting tools.

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Hi,

Report Model will help you with Reporting Services and Report Builder but I doubt you will be able to use the Report Model from Excel...

When working with Excel, I usually create a datasource to the cube itself.

Eric