Analysis Services 2005 comes with a new integrated development environment based on Visual Studio. Called the Business Intelligence (BI) Development Studio, the environment replaces Analysis Manager, which developers used to create and configure Analysis Services 2000 objects, such as cubes. The BI Development Studio also provides tools and utilities for building Integration Services and Reporting Services projects. Because the system runs within Visual Studio .NET, developers inherit that platform’s familiar benefits, including source-code control and improved project organization.

This illustration highlights features of the BI Development Studio’s cube designer. The designer contains several tabs, each giving access to sets of objects that developers can view and edit. The rightmost pane of the Cube Structure tab shown here reveals the schema of a Data Source View (DSV) that is used to construct a cube. The panes on the left list the components of the cube (its constituent measures, dimensions, attributes, and hierarchies).

Screen shot of the Visual Studio-based development environment (included with Analysis Services 2005) which developers use to create objects such as cubes, dimensions, hierarchies, and key performance indicators