Re: UDM approach/concept in real

Marcel,

I know this problem very well.
As I said, we cannot say that Microsoft is completely lying, because
the UDM is queryable with both MDX and SQL.
But:
1) You have to build a UDM model that covers all your data, attributes,
and so on (you can use ROLAP if you don't want to replicate data in
another storage like Analysis Services)
2) You are constrained by relationships you define into UDM - you are
not free to JOIN tables as your will as you can do in a RDBMS like SQL
Server when you use SQL as a query language to UDM.
3) Syntax for SQL is restricted when you use SQL on UDM.

These are the facts - now my opinion.

I can say that the Microsoft proposition about UDM is a bit marketing
oriented, there are things that works better with UDM (and MDX,
typically), and things that works better with SQL. In my experience, a
detailed query (data from ONE customer over a million) is faster and
more flexible with SQL. Analysis of aggregated data (at many different
levels) works better with MDX.
Just to make an example, UDM allows models like those I described in my
"The many-to-many revolution" you can get here:
http://www.sqlbi.eu/manytomany.aspx - this is a unique feature of UDM
that you don't have on many of the competitor tools.

I have been working with BI tools for 10 years and each time a vendor
propose a new "ultimate model" for the data, I am sceptic.
That said, I still think that Microsoft platform is excellent. If you
complain against MS marketing, you should bring to law court many other
vendors in this arena... :-)

Marco Russo
http://www.sqlbi.eu
http://www.sqljunkies.com/weblog/sqlbi


Marcel Sottnik wrote:
Hi Marco,

If what you say is true, M$ lies massivelly. In the M$'s own (in)famous document from MSDN (
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms345143.aspx ) propagating new UDM concept is clearly stated, that this is
possible with current implementation of AS.

Marco Russo wrote:
Marcel,

the actual UDM is not able to do this kind of integration. UDM today is
the model defined in Analysis Services, that you query with MDX only
(you could use also SQL via OLE/DB provider for Analysis Services, but
it is somewhat limited).

Today the best way to get your consolidation is to build a rock solid
data warehouse with all your data, and build a UDM on this.

This post is, of course, not very marketing-oriented... :-)

Marco Russo
http://www.sqlbi.eu
http://www.sqljunkies.com/weblog/sqlbi


Marcel Sottnik wrote:
Hi NG

Everyone talks about UDM and consolidating heterogenous datasources (OLTP, OLAP, flatfiles) into one cube and one
dimensional model. However, I didn't find any example of such an implementation. Could someone provide us with something
like that?

BG
Marcel


.

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