Using SAS OLAP Cubes

Using a Cube with Additional SAS Products

Listed below are the SAS products the enable you to access, view, query, and report on SAS OLAP cubes. Specific OLAP functionality within these products is also listed.

SAS Products That Use SAS OLAP Cubes

The following SAS products access SAS OLAP cubes:

SAS Enterprise Guide
SAS Information Map Studio
SAS Web Report Studio
SAS Web OLAP Viewer for Java
SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office
SQL Pass-Through Facility for OLAP. For more information, see Accessing OLAP Cubes from SAS: SQL Pass-Through Facility for OLAP.

Note: The SQL Pass-Through Facility for OLAP does not require additional licensing.

For information on how to access SAS OLAP cubes in these different products, see the individual product Help and documentation.

SAS Enterprise Guide

SAS Enterprise Guide provides a dedicated, intuitive and advanced interface is provided for analyzing business information stored in OLAP data cubes. SAS Enterprise Guide is an ODBO-compliant OLAP Viewer. When accessing OLAP cubes via ODBO, the SAS OLAP Server acts as an Open OLAP Provider, and SAS Enterprise Guide is an Open OLAP Consumer. SAS Enterprise Guide features drillable, interactive graphics and enables users to generate ad hoc queries for analytics based on cube data.

The OLAP Analyzer supports all of the functionality required to navigate through multidimensional data, add topic-specific business calculations, and extract information from multidimensional sources for further analysis with advanced statistical procedures or data mining. With the OLAP Analyzer and SAS Enterprise Guide, you can do the following:

access SAS OLAP cubes directly from the metadata definition. You can preview each cube's dimensions, measure its contents, and override the default view before accessing the cube.
slice and dice data as needed to explore the information, as well as drill-through to underlying detailed data.

SAS Enterprise Guide provides the following features for OLAP cube access, visualization and manipulation:

support for drilling, slicing and pivoting in a cube to explore the cube data. You can also drill-through to the underlying detailed data for a cube. With drill-through capability, you can navigate in your data from the most summarized levels to the most detailed levels. You can drill down on all members of a level or drill down on a specific member of the level. You can also drill in the graph view.
calculation (calculated member or measure) support, including simple calculations, count analysis, relative contribution analysis and custom calculations (such as time series analysis).
support for filtering that is based on a ranking function or on a range of values. You can now filter by member caption and member property. You can also create filters that can be used by multiple queries.
support for totals, subtotals, and percent of totals calculations.
multiple, independent views of a cube. Specific views on multidimensional information can be saved as bookmarks for easy reuse.
surfacing of multidimensional information slices to other analytical SAS procedures for advanced analysis, including use in data mining procedures.
surfacing of SAS OLAP data sources from the SAS OLAP Server or other third-party vendors supporting OLE DB for OLAP (for example, SAP BW and Microsoft Analysis Services).

For further information on SAS Enterprise Guide, see Getting Started with SAS Enterprise Guide and the SAS Enterprise Guide Help.

SAS Information Map Studio

SAS Information Maps can translate business questions into the necessary MDX code to access SAS OLAP structures. SAS Information Map Studio is a Java application that enables data modelers and data architects to create and manage SAS Information Maps, which are business metadata about your physical data. Information maps enable you to surface your warehouse data in business terms that typical business users understand, while storing key information that is needed to build appropriate queries.

Information maps can be built from various data structures, including star schemas, snowflake schemas, normalized data structures, or OLAP cubes, providing business users with easy access to enterprise data. The SAS OLAP Server is required to create information maps on top of multidimensional data sources.

For more information about SAS Information Map Studio, see SAS Information Map Studio: Getting Started with SAS Information Maps.

SAS Web Report Studio

SAS Web Report Studio is a Web-based application that enables you to create, view, and organize reports. You can use SAS Web Report Studio to perform these OLAP-specific tasks:

drill and expand tables and graphs
support ragged and unbalanced hierarchies
pivot individual crosstabulation dimensions
switch dimensions and measures with the Data Selection dialog box
synchronize report components to display a common drill state or have them remain independent

In addition to OLAP-specific tasks, SAS Web Report Studio enables you to perform the following tasks:

Create reports	Beginning with a simple and intuitive view of your data provided by SAS Information Maps (created in SAS Information Map Studio), you can create reports based on either relational or multidimensional data sources.
View and manipulate reports	While viewing reports using a thin client (a Web browser), you can filter, sort, and rank the data that is shown in tables, crosstabulations, and graphs. With multidimensional data, you can drill down on data in crosstabulations and graphs and drill-through to the underlying data.

For more information about using SAS Web Report Studio, see SAS Web Report Studio: User's Guide.

SAS Web OLAP Viewer for Java

The SAS Web OLAP Viewer is a Web application that provides a Web interface for viewing and exploring OLAP data. It enables business users to look at data from multiple angles, drill-through to detail data, and add linked graphs or maps to gain greater insights into trends, exceptions and opportunities.

The SAS Web OLAP Viewer surfaces SAS OLAP cubes, OLAP information maps, and OLAP-based data explorations. It provides an easy-to-use interface from which you can select a data source, view the data, and customize your view with features such as sorting and filtering. With the SAS Web OLAP Viewer, you can perform these tasks:

Explore OLAP data

You can select an OLAP data source and explore multidimensional data using a table or graph view. Specifically you can do the following:

explore multidimensional data using a table or graph view (color-coded table, bar chart, bar-line chart, line plot, pie chart, scatter plot, tile chart, map)
change business queries by selecting business items to be displayed from a side bar
slice through multidimensional data by using a special slicer dimension
dice multidimensional data by applying filters on any level of a hierarchy
drill up/down through hierarchies or expand/collapse entire levels
explore data following ragged or unbalanced hierarchies that model true hierarchies as they are experienced in business
obtain detailed information for every cell (drill-through) with the option to export it to Microsoft Excel
display and filter on properties associated with members inside the OLAP data source (member properties)

Analyze OLAP data

Multidimensional views can be adapted to business scenarios in many different ways, including applying filters and rankings, calculating new measures, sorting, and adding totals and subtotals. Specifically, you can do the following:

rank multidimensional data to identify top performers or losers (ties can be handled)
display totals and subtotals on cross tables
add the percentage that a measure contributes to the total or a subtotal of a table with a single click on a dedicated button
calculate new measures and add them to any view

Interactively explore geographical maps.

Maps from an ESRI ArcGIS Server can be used to display OLAP data just like other views of the data. Users can drill on map regions visualizing information from an OLAP data source in real time. Specifically, you can do the following:

use maps from ESRI's ArcGIS Server to display OLAP data just like any other view on the data
perform synchronized drill and display for map and table view
drill on regions in the map visualizing information from an OLAP data source in real time, enabling a zoom down to the level of individual houses on a road
drive the color coding of maps by data from the OLAP data source

Easily save and publish results

Views that reveal new business insights can be easily saved and shared among colleagues, saved as SAS Web Report Studio reports for further formatting, or saved as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or Adobe PDF documents.

For more information, see the SAS Web OLAP Viewer for Java Help.

SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office

The SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office is a Component Object Model (COM) add-in that extends Microsoft Office by enabling you to harness the power of SAS analytics and access data directly from Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Specifically, you can do the following:

access and view SAS OLAP Cubes or any data source that is available from your SAS server. There is no size limit on the SAS data sources that you can open.
filter your data using an intuitive user interface or using an advanced SQL editor.
sort your data by an unlimited number of variables.
refresh your data to incorporate any changes that were made to a data source that is saved on a server.

For more information, see the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office: Getting Started with Data Analysis and the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office Help.

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