SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services provides an integrated view of your business data for reporting, OLAP analysis, key performance indicator (KPI) scorecards, and data mining.
Unified Dimensional Model
Analysis Services provides a business semantic model, referred to as a Unified Dimensional Model (UDM), that defines business entities, business logic, calculations, and metrics. The UDM is a central place that serves as the single version of truth for all reports, spreadsheets, OLAP browsers, KPIs, and analytical applications.
Proactive Caching
Proactive Caching enables the combination of real-time updates with multidimensional online analytical processing (MOLAP) class performance. Analysis Services maintains a highly compressed and optimized data cache that is maintained automatically as the data in the underlying source databases changes. The cache provides superb query performance and isolates back-end source systems from the load of the analytical queries.
Advanced Business Intelligence
The KPI framework provides a rich centralized repository defining key metrics and scorecards. The KPI framework in Analysis Services lets you easily build balanced scorecards and other types of business performance management applications.
Web Services
XML for Analysis (XML/A) is the native, standards-based protocol for communication with the Analysis Services server.
