Products & Solutions / Foundation Tools

SAS® OLAP Server

A multidimensional data store designed to provide quick access to presummarized data

SAS® OLAP Server is a multidimensional data store designed from the outset to provide quick access to presummarized data generated from vast amounts of detailed data. Decision makers need quick access to summarized data so they can make timely decisions based on knowledge instead of gut feelings.

Benefits

  • Provides a transparent and integrated ETL process for building consistent OLAP cubes.
  • Delivers fast, stable summarized data for business intelligence applications.
  • Frees IT from constantly creating ad hoc reports and data summaries.

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Features

  • Industrial-strength, multidimensional database
  • Fast processing of queries.
  • Easy-to-use GUIs for building and maintaining OLAP cubes.
  • Optimization of summarized data to conserve system resources.
  • Centralized metadata.
  • Powerful interfaces for OLAP server monitoring.

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“ This customized online application allows us to understand and analyze complex data about a very large, very diverse work force, and it supports the ongoing planning processes that will make Canada's Public Service a model for the rest of the world. ”

—Harris Sinclair

Manager of Data Services Division

Public Service Commission

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How SAS® Is Different

  • SAS provides support for several OLAP architectures: multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP), relational OLAP (ROLAP) and hybrid OLAP (HOLAP) to address various reporting and analysis requirements.
  • SAS provides a single shared layer of metadata to ensure traceability from the operational data source through the ETL process to the destination OLAP report.

Benefits

  • Provides a transparent and integrated ETL process for building consistent OLAP cubes. Using a simplified ETL process, SAS OLAP Server makes it easy to build consistent OLAP cubes from disparate systems. Integrated metadata ensures that consistent information is delivered across the enterprise and enables IT to quickly justify data integrity.
  • Delivers fast, stable summarized data for business intelligence applications. SAS OLAP Server quickly delivers information to business intelligence applications, irrespective of the amount of underlying data. Summarizing data at several levels of detail before storing provides the summarized data that business intelligence applications require without the need for additional “on-the-fly” processing.
  • Frees IT from constantly creating ad hoc reports and data summaries. Because summarized data is organized along business lines, users can get the reports they need without involving IT, freeing IT from the constant work of creating reports and data summaries.

Features

Industrial-strength, multidimensional database
  • Designed to handle large volumes of business intelligence data.
  • Supports multidimensional (MOLAP) and hybrid (HOLAP) data stores.
  • Routines enable SAS procedures to query the SAS OLAP Server by using SQL Pass-Through with reach-through from multidimensional data to the underlying detailed data.
  • Native support for open industry standards:
    • OLE DB for OLAP.
    • Fully compliant implementation of MDX query language for communication with third-party clients.
Fast processing of queries.
  • Multithreaded query engine.
  • Data can be spread across multiple disk systems, providing parallel read access for query threads.
Easy-to-use GUIs for building and maintaining OLAP cubes.
  • Included with SAS OLAP Server, SAS OLAP Cube Studio makes it easy to define data dimensions and aggregations.
  • SAS OLAP Cube Studio is integrated with SAS Data Integration Studio so you can build cubes from cleansed data sources and load them for later use and updating.
  •  New Java-based wizard facilitates designing, creating, updating and tuning OLAP cubes.
Optimization of summarized data to conserve system resources.
  • Seldom accessed data can be stored in a compressed format.
  • Frequently queried data can be cached in memory for faster access.


Centralized metadata.
  • All metadata is stored in a single, open location - the SAS Metadata Server. SAS OLAP Server is fully integrated into the open security model maintained in SAS Metadata Server that is used across all SAS products and solutions.
Powerful interfaces for OLAP server monitoring.
  • Define OLAP data servers and their configuration parameters, including performance logging options.
  • Application Response Management (ARM) classes used to monitor all server activities. Result sets can be transferred to SAS or third-party clients, such as HP-UX Workload Manager, in order to monitor activity and performance.

System Requirements

Supported platforms
  • AIX (64-bit) Release 5.1+
  • HP/UX Itanium (64-bit), Release 11i+
  • Linux for Intel (32-bit): Red Hat Linux 8.0, RHAS 2.1, RHEL 3.0, SuSE SLES 8, SLES 9 
  • Linux for Intel (64-bit): Red Hat RHEL 3.0
  • OS/390, Version 3, Release 10
  • Solaris (64-bit) 8, 9, 10 on SPARC
  • Windows (x86-32): Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Professional, Windows NT 4 Server, Windows Server 2003
  • Windows (64-bit on Itanium): Windows Server 2003
  • z/OS, Version 1
Required software
  • Base SAS®


Please contact your SAS representative with any additional questions about technical requirements.

Ready to learn more?

Call us at 1-800-727-0025 (US and Canada) or request more information.