What is the difference between SSAS 2000 and SSAS 2005?

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What is the difference between SSAS 2000 and SSAS 2005?..

Answer / ranjit

Many SQL Server developers eagerly anticipate the long-
awaited release of SQL Server 2005, formerly code-
named "Yukon." Major goals for Business Intelligence (BI)
in the 2005 release are better integration of the somewhat
loosely-coupled BI components of SQL Server 2000, provide
enterprise reporting capability in the form of Reporting
Services, and enable faster and easier development
of "pervasive" BI, which can reach people at every level of
the organization. To achieve these goals, each existing
component of the SQL Server suite has been changed or
replaced in the 2005 release. Reporting Services,
originally slated to debut as a new component of SQL Server
2005, has recently been released independently—but remains
an integral component of the SQL Server 2005 vision.

SQL Server BI developers are well-advised to learn as much
as possible about these changes and to start planning how
to capitalize on them. This article focuses on some of the
most basic differences between the 2000 and Beta 1 2005
versions of Analysis Services, and addresses these
differences in three overlapping areas:

User Interface
Architecture
Programming
Beyond these three major areas, there are many other
changes in Analysis Services 2005 (AS 2005) that are
outside the scope of this article. I've listed (but not
discussed) these at the end of this article. Also not
covered but worth noting are enhancements to Transact-SQL
in SQL Server 2005 itself which help facilitate BI
analysis. For more information, you can find details on all
the changes in this Microsoft whitepaper.

Keep in mind that the SQL 2005 version discussed in this
article is still in beta; therefore nothing should be
regarded as finalized.

User Interface
Analysis Services 2000 (AS 2000) developers use Analysis
Manager 2000 (AM 2000) to create and manage OLAP (Online
Analytical Processing) cubes. They also use the SQL Server
2000 tools Query Analyzer and Enterprise Manager to develop
the relational star schemas on which the OLAP cubes are
based, and the Extract Transform and Load (ETL), in the
form of stored procedures and Data Transformation Services
(DTS), to load them. In AS 2000, these three tools are
independent, the user experience is inconsistent, and it is
almost impossible to establish development standards.

AS 2005 incorporates the functionality of those three
former tools into two new tools hosted by the Visual Studio
2005 IDE, "BI Workbench" and "SQL Workbench." You use BI
Workbench—like AM 2000—to create and manage cubes; however,
unlike AS 2000, BI Workbench also includes design
capabilities for DTS (found in Enterprise Manager in SQL
Server 2000) and Reporting Services. SQL Workbench merges
the functions of both Query Analyzer and Enterprise Manager
as well as some of the administrative functions of AM 2000.

The AM 2000 experience has characteristics such as:

The user must explicitly connect to an existing Analysis
Services Server before any other tasks are possible. Each
AS server registered with AM 2000 appears as an object.
The object of coarsest grain is the database, a collection
of related connection definitions, cubes, shared
dimensions, data-mining models, and roles. The database,
archived as a CAB file, is the fundamental unit of
deployment between AS servers.
Cubes must be based on a single fact table at the center of
a star or snowflake schema, which is created and populated
using other tools.
Building a cube is a manually-intensive process, even using
the cube wizard.
Analysis Services 2000 stores metadata in either an Access
or SQL Server database.

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