| susiedba@hotmail.com 2006-10-25, 6:00 am |
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I think that AS is more important; more critical-- than RS.
there are other tools like RS on the market.
but AS leads the market by a wide margin.
Does that mean it's EASY? no. Does it mean it's SIMPLE? no.
I would reccomend taking a month off of work; immersing yourself in
SSAS and coming back to work to scrap all your existing DB work.
10 million relational developers CAN be wrong and they are.
It's better to build a solution for non technical people-- SSAS is best
utilized using OWC - Office Web Components- and non-technical people...
All of your relational mess just sounds overly complicated.
-Aaron
C4rtm4N wrote:
> I'm about to embark on re-writing a database & bespoke web reporting
> application for our call centre & would like a little advice please.
>
> Currently the database has 10 tables containing summaried (<=1 record
> per staff member per day) data from different legacy systems,
> populated by DTS. There is an 11th table that has staff data in which
> is used to link the others together as many have different primary
> keys. After the data has been linked together an aggregated table (1
> record per person per day) is created once a day.
>
> Currently our intranet site is configured to run a number of stored
> procedures that return KPI data from the aggregated table into
> datasets which are then rendered in the form of datagrids. Users are
> either allowed to specify the parameters for these stored procedures
> or they are pre-determined for them depending on who they are (eg
> agents in the call centre all see a MTD report for themselves only).
>
> The aim of the re-write is to
> (a) cut down on admin when KPI definitions change
> (b) make the setup much more generic so that it could be transported
> to other areas of the business or even to different companies with
> minimum rework
> (c) upgrade from SQL 2000 to SQL 2005
> (d) tidy the webpages a little & maybe add some gauge type controls
>
> I'm unsure about 2 things -
> (1) Should I totally re-design things & use Analysis Services instead
> or would I find no benefit as everyone is only given one view of the
> truth (ie no slicing & dicing depending upon preference)? I know very
> little about this service so it would be a challenge & from what I've
> read I'm not so sure whether it would be appropriate for all of the
> staff querying the database constantly anyway(there are over 500 of
> them & currently the stored procedures use nested temp tables to
> calculate everything that needs to be shown on the webpages). I guess
> that I couldn't fill a datagrid with their data using this method
> either but I'm sure that someone will be able to keep me right.
>
> (2) Should I dump the datagrids in favour of Reporting Services? This
> was originally not used as our IT department could get it installed
> properly on the SQL 2000 server & the datagrid solution was found to
> be both adequate & easy to setup. We have Crystal Reports in the
> company also but licence costs are likely to be a problem.
>
> Hope I haven't upset anyone by crossposting the question - I'm just
> after a balanced view before I start work & the queries fit with a few
> different ng's.
>
> TIA
>
> Steve
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