Requirements for a Local Cube in Analysis Services 2005 and Excel 2003

Analysis Services really shines as a client-server solution.  However, for remote locations, portability, and custom applications, local cubes may be what you want. 

Creating a local cube is fairly simple so I won't go into it.

The syntax can be found here.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms145581.aspx

After playing a bit with the parameters, I managed to create a global cube located in a .cub file on my laptop.  Oddly enough, Excel 2003 does not associate .cub files, so you need to either associate it or open Excel and then open the .cub file.  Opening the file brings up the standard pivot table interface against the local cube.  A couple problems I encountered - dragging in dimension attributes appeared slower than hosting the cube on a server, and I encountered the 64,000 row limit pretty quickly.

I passed the cube on to someone else in our company, who received a No Visible Tables error message.

Nobody said client requirements for BI solutions were trivial.

Here they are.

Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0 Redistributable Package (x86)

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0856EACB-4362-4B0D-8EDD-AAB15C5E04F5&displaylang=en

MSXLM 6.0 Parser

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=46&p=1&SrcDisplayLang=en&SrcCategoryId=&SrcFamilyId=993C0BCF-3BCF-4009-BE21-27E85E1857B1&u=http%3a%2f%2fdownload.microsoft.com%2fdownload%2f2%2fe%2f0%2f2e01308a-e17f-4bf9-bf48-161356cf9c81%2fmsxml6.msi

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 PivotTable Services

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=2BB62F35-D041-42AC-98DA-6EC97168BE21&displaylang=en

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Provider Services 9.0 OLEDB Provider

http://download.microsoft.com/download/4/4/D/44DBDE61-B385-4FC2-A67D-48053B8F9FAD/SQLServer2005_ASOLEDB9.msi

Of course, Analysis Services 2005 also has support for synchronizing databases, so if it is possible to keep multiple servers at remote locations, this would probably be the better route for things like SOX compliance and security purposes.