Introduction to the new Microsoft Analysis Services connector in Toad Data Point

Hi. My name is Julie Hyman, and I'm the Product Manager for the Toad Business Intelligence suite of products, which includes Toad Data Point. In this short video, I'll be showing how we have added and new connector to Microsoft Analysis Services in Toad Data Point Professional Edition, Version 3.3. This new connector in the Version 3.3 release enables users to access Microsoft Analysis Services Cubes and map queries against these cubes, which then can be used within the product as part of SQL queries, just like any other data source. So in this example here, I'm connecting to a Microsoft Analysis Services Provider, which has a variety of cubes. So just selecting this provider here, I can see down here all of the different cubes available to me. Now a cube needs to be turned into a query in order to be brought into the visual query builder or query editor. So very quickly how to turn this cube into a query, I can simply right mouse click on the cube that I want here to the channel sales and hit View Details. Or alternatively, I could have used this Explore DB. We'll just go into View Details here. This brings up our Cube Viewer. And what I'm seeing here are all of the dimensions and measures that are available within this cube. And so I can create a query here and use this as an object within Toad Data Point simply by selecting some information. I'll select a dimension here, such as Reseller Name. And drop that into my workspace here. And then I'm going to select a measure to go along with that as well. So in this case, we'll just go ahead and select Gross Profit, and drop that data item in here. Now you can see when I drop the data items into the grid, it's not automatically refreshing the data. Since we're not sure how large this cube is, we don't make any assumptions and just start refreshing and writing queries. But in this case, I'll just hit the Refresh button so we can actually see the data that belongs within this query that I've just build. OK. And so I can see that I've got my reseller information here, my gross profit here. And I can continue to embellish this information, if that's what I want to do, by selecting additional dimensions and measures. I can go ahead, for example, and just chose, let's see, some other the reseller information. Maybe their Annual Sales number. We'll go ahead and add that to the grid as well. And I can go ahead and refresh that data. Now if I didn't want to press the Refresh button each time, I could just choose to refresh the browser immediately. And then as I drag the objects into the browser, it would automatically refresh with the data. Alternatively, if I didn't want to refresh the data at all, and I just wanted to build the query without hitting the back end data, I can go ahead and save the query immediately without refreshing. But in this sample, we're going to refresh the data. And let's say this is all of the fields that I'm looking for, just for this particular query. I can now go ahead and save that query. And we'll call it ResellerData_ with_Profit. And now this query is available to me to use within the system. So I can see here I've got ResellerData_ with_Profit, which is the one I just used. So what I mean by having this data available to me is I can go and build a query now using the standard tools in Toad Data Point, the visual query builder, or even the simple editor. And I can drag and drop this item into my query, and using the standard Toad Data Point functionality, I can query this data directly from the cube.