Architecting a Successful BI Solution

IT Managers appreciate Analyzer's flexible architecture and multiple deployment options. Depending on the preference of the organization and users, Analyzer can be deployed for 100% zero-footprint access directly through the Internet Explorer web browser, or can be deployed for access through SharePoint® portals. Analyzer can also be deployed as Software-as-a-Service, freeing up precious IT resources. In addition, Analyzer may be embedded into existing applications through the use of web services, to support the analysis needs of internal systems like CRM and ERP as well as applications of your own you sell to your customers.

Analyzer is also flexible when it comes to accessing your data. Generating its own MDX code, Analyzer can display data from SQL Server Analysis Services® cubes, whether these are MOLAP, ROLAP, or HOLAP cubes. Analyzer can also generate SQL queries that can drill back through SQL Server to the original source data in data marts, data warehouses, and operational systems like CRM and ERP. Analyzer accesses these various SQL Server data sources through the ADO object model. This seamless integration provides users with multiple analysis options in the environments they are used to working in and are most familiar with.

The most common configuration for Analyzer includes hosting the Analyzer application on your IIS® web server, which is connected to SQL Server and Analysis Services (OLAP) — each typically on separate servers. This configuration is known as the monolithic deployment. Analyzer also performs extremely well in a load-balanced deployment, where IIS is load-balanced among several servers. This works well for handling multiple, concurrent users in larger organizations, and offers the users higher availability through the use of failover.

Analyzer also integrates with your existing Active Directory security environment, and can also integrate with LDAP and other security configurations such as Kerberos. Analyzer also integrates directly with the data access security defined in your Analysis Services cubes in order to limit access to only the data people need.

Analyzer was developed from the ground up using Microsoft's .NET application development framework. Analyzer is pure ASP.NET/DHTML and was written specifically for SQL Server Analysis Services with support for SQL Server. Analyzer was written in C# using Microsoft Visual Studio as the integrated development environment.