Chapter 7. Securing Your Cube Project

Data warehouse solutions often contain sensible information such as economic information about a company. A cube built on top of a data warehouse enables users to query the information using an easily understandable structure and provides the ability to query large amounts of data in an instant. Because of this, security is of uttermost importance. Analysis Services contains the functionalities needed to secure the most sensitive data down to the individual cell. This means that you can, for example, easily create a cube that only allows the users to see individual product lines or regions, or you can create a cube that allows users to only see data at a certain granularity.

Ensure that you create a security model that is as simple as possible; a complex model can be a nightmare to maintain. A complex model can also make it hard for the user to understand why they see a specific value when performing analysis. A user may think that they see a value for...