Chapter 54. Introduction to SSAS 2008 data mining
With SQL Server 2008, you get a complete business intelligence (BI) suite. You can use the SQL Server Database Engine to maintain a data warehouse (DW), SQL Server Reporting Services (RS) to create managed and ad hoc reports, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) to build and use extract, transform, and load (ETL) applications, and SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) to create Unified Dimensional Model (UDM) cubes.
Probably the easiest step into business intelligence is using reports created with RS. But this simplicity has a price. End users have limited dynamic capabilities when they view a report. You can extend the capabilities of RS with report models, but using report models to build reports is an advanced skill for end users. You also have to consider that the performance is limited; for example, aggregating two years of sales data from a production database could take hours. Therefore, RS reports aren’t useful for analyses of large quantities of data over time directly from production systems.
