Microsoft Analysis Services 2005: Displaying grid using ADOMD.NET and MDX

This article is targeted to all who have worked on ASP.NET web applications, Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services and MDX in some manner; and wish to add power of analytics to their web application.

Concept of Data Warehousing is not new anymore. With the rise in the scale, size and complexity of the business in today's world, need of business analytics has become almost inevitable. This has lead to the growth of breed of tools and technologies termed as "Business Intelligence" (BI). Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services is one such product from Microsoft that helps in building business analytics applications. The querying language MDX is very powerful means of fetching multidimensional data from Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services cube.

However, the challenge remains here is how to present this analytical data to the business users so that it can aid them in their decision making process. There are abundant reporting tools and products available in the market today that can help you achieve this. Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services is one example of such tool.

This article describes yet another means of presenting analytical data to the user. It explains how to execute MDX query using Microsoft ADOMD.NET client components to fetch multidimensional data from the cube and present it to the user in the form of a grid.

Even though the examples shown here is limited to presentation of analytical data, its functionality can be extended to do lot more things such as Drill Down, Drill Up, Sorting, Filtering etc depending on the business needs. You can even create reports and graphs with the data.