Introduction

This chapter teaches how to secure Analysis Services starting at the instance level and working all the way down to the individual cube cells. Analysis Services administrators have unrestricted access to all items within the server—they can restart the service, read and process data in every database, dimension, and cube, alter configuration settings, collect traces, and so on. This level of access is best reserved for database administrators. SSAS developers need full access to the database they're working with but not necessarily to the entire instance; each instance could host multiple databases constructed by multiple development teams. Individual users may need access to all or some of the cube and dimension data depending on their job requirements. In addition to explicitly defining the list of dimension members, you can also dynamically configure the security if your cube is queried by many users, each requiring access to a specific dataset.

Unlike the SQL Server relational...