SSAS Support for Reporting

[#1]

Hi Everyone,

We are evaluating some of leading BI tools in the market to develop a Reporting Solution that to  has following features

i) Web Support - Can be viewed on browsers

ii) Publish/Subscription

iii) Export - as pdf, excel, or image and etc

iv) ability to Drill down the reports

Ofcourse, Qlikview was also on the list. What we already have is the data in the form of cubes stored in MSSQL- Analysis Server. We would like to connect to these cubes and use our own mdx queries to create the reports/charts/dashboards. From what i understand is that, qlikview doesnt have a direct way of connecting to SSAS as tableau/tibco does but based on the replies in the community, i managed to connect to SSAS . The problem is that mdx query generator tool doesnt show our application specific measures/dimensions.

Can somebody help in resolving or over coming this problem?

[Josh_Good]

I would encourage you to consider connecting to the source data for your cubes.  QlikView is intentionally designed to not use cubes because cubes are a technology that is designed to over come limitation of query based analytics.  Typically cubes are essentially preaggregated answers to predefined questions.  QlikView's approach is perform all the aggregations on the fly using an associative in-memory model.  This will enable the users to ask any question of the data at any level of aggregation not just questions the cube designed expected the users to ask.

At the end of the day, cubes are old technology.  That was designed to get our issues of older slower computer technology.

[#3]

Josh. i managed to connect to OLAP and import the fact and dimensions on the server to create the reports in qlikview. it is not pretty straight forward, i would say.

[Josh_Good]

I don't disagree with you.  Connecting QlikView to a cube is far from best practice.  Best practice would be to connect QlikView to the source data.  Using cubes as a source for QlikView is creating a lot of extra work (getting data into the cubes, getting data out etc).  More importantly, using cubes with preaggerated data will make your QlikView app less flexible and require more development and/or more apps.

[#5]

Hi Aru,

Can you please help me with the steps, how can I connect SSAS cube to QlikView?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Regards,

Abhishek