Drill Through in Analysis Services

Drill through functionality was not included in the first version of OLAP technology from Microsoft (SQL Server 7). I found it such sought after requirement that I created my own drill through for ThinSlicer (the first thin client cube browser). It would simply generate an SQL statement based on the dimension members and assumed that the level names were the same as the column names. Then in 2000, drill though functionality was included in Analysis Services, so I removed my custom code.

However, things changed in 2005 (SQL Server 2005) when drill through architecture was changed so that a drill through request did not go to the relational database (for the atomic records) rather, it returned the most detailed cell data from the cube. This, was a huge change in functionality, and some would argue that is not "drill through" but "drill bottom". As you can imagine, there are security implications with drilling through to relational data.