Microsoft Analysis Services - History

History

In 1996, Microsoft began its foray into the OLAP Server business by acquiring the OLAP software technology from Israel-based Panorama Software. Just over two years later, in 1998, Microsoft released OLAP Services as part of SQL Server 7. OLAP Services supported MOLAP, ROLAP, and HOLAP architectures, and it used OLE DB for OLAP as the client access API and MDX as a query language. It could work in client-server mode or offline mode with local cube files.

In 2000, Microsoft released Analysis Services 2000. It was renamed from "OLAP Services" due to the inclusion of data mining services. Analysis Services 2000 was considered an evolutionary release, since it was built on the same architecture as OLAP Services and was therefore backward compatible with it. Major improvements included more flexibility in dimension design through support of parent child dimensions, changing dimensions, and virtual dimensions. Another feature was a greatly enhanced calculation engine with support for unary operators, custom rollups, and cell calculations. Other features were dimension security, distinct count, connectivity over HTTP, session cubes, grouping levels, and many others.

In 2005, Microsoft released the next generation of OLAP and data mining technology as Analysis Services 2005. It maintained backward compatibility on the API level: although applications written with OLE DB for OLAP and MDX continued to work, the architecture of the product was completely different. The major change came to the model in the form of UDM - Unified Dimensional Model.