Configuring storage modes in Analysis Services

As explained in the introduction to Processing objects section in this chapter, processing reads data from the relational sources and stores it in Analysis Services. What gets stored is defined through storage modes. There are three main storage modes in Analysis Services and these are Multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP), Relational OLAP (ROLAP), and Hybrid OLAP (HOLAP).

MOLAP

In MOLAP, everything is stored in Analysis Services, both the detail data as well as all the aggregations. The data that you will see will be from the time of the latest processing, this means that you need to schedule a refresh from time to time through processing of the cube or database.

ROLAP

In ROLAP, nothing is stored in Analysis Services. Whenever you query the cube, a query will be sent down to the relational source. This means that you will always get the latest data and no processing needs to be done to fetch data from the source, as this is done at query time. As no data...