Understanding Analysis Services Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services is an optional component of SQL Server that is available in the Standard, Enterprise, and Developer Editions of SQL Server. Though you need not install this component to have a fully functional SQL Server, you’ll find that for many analytical tasks it is essential to have. In this chapter, you’ll learn about Analysis Services and see how it’s used in analyzing data. The easiest way to think of Analysis Services is as the OLAP component of SQL Server. OLAP stands for Online Analytical Processing. That’s a mouthful, but the basic idea is pretty simple. Suppose you have a lot of data, say, ten million rows of shipping and receiving information for a warehouse, listing product number, quantity, price, and date. Now suppose you want to know what the inventory change was on product 143576 in March, April, and May of 1994.You could write a fairly simple query to get the information you want. The catch is that it would probably take a very long time for SQL Server to churn through all that information.