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by Jerod Johnson | August 04, 2021

Getting More from Your Multidimensional Data & Analytics Services

As data becomes more complex, organizations are increasingly adopting multidimensional data solutions to drive deeper analytics and gain actionable insights across the business. Multidimensional data boasts the benefits of grouping similar information for better organization, viewing, and comparison and higher performance due to pre-calculated facts. Self-built multidimensional data structures like SQL Server Analysis Services, along with many of the modern analytics services that companies use are inherently multidimensional, including Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and most online ad services. Unfortunately, not all modern data tooling supports multidimensional data. That's where CData comes in.

This article walks through several customer stories where organizations were able to leverage CData connectivity solutions to make the most of their multidimensional analytics data.

SQL Server Analytics Services in SAS

When a major financial services organization consisting of banking, lending, wealth, and trust companies wanted to pull large volumes of data from their OLAP cubes into SAS, they found the native connector unable to handle many of the queries they were looking to perform. For those queries that were supported, they experienced performance issues and client-side resource overuse.

Using the CData ODBC Driver for SQL Analysis Services, the financial group found support and improved performance for all the queries they wanted to run from SAS. The CData ODBC Driver can handle DAX queries and pass queries directly through to their underlying OLAP cubes, resulting in faster query times and freeing up client-side resources.

Read exactly how to connect to SQL Analysis Services data in SAS in our Knowledge Base article:

Connect to SQL Analysis Services from SAS for Real-Time Analytics

Adobe Analytics in Power BI

A large provisioner of scientific instrumentation and software services uses Adobe Analytics for their reporting processes and segmentation of marketing channels. They also use Power BI for dashboarding, but found that the performance of the native connectivity did not meet their standards for performance.

Using the CData Power BI Connector for Adobe Analytics, the organization was able to easily work with Adobe Analytics data within Power BI with the performance they needed. This includes the ability to perform real-time analytics thanks to CData's built-in support for the DirectQuery functionality in Power BI. They also discovered that they could generate custom reports in Adobe Analytics directly from Power BI using the CData Power BI Connector.

Not only did the customer see improved performance with CData, but they gained functionality that was not available anywhere else.

Read our Knowledge Base article to walk through connecting to your Adobe Analytics data in Power BI:

Author Power BI Reports on Real-Time Adobe Analytics Data

Analytics Services in SSIS & Azure Data Factory

A prominent manufacturer of musical instrument strings and accessories is using a variety of analytics services to monitor web traffic, ad spend, conversions, and more. These services include Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, YouTube Ads, Google Analytics, and others, all of which are multidimensional.

With pre-calculated (or quickly calculated) facts available, the manufacturer was able to quickly dive deep into their data – but only in one service at a time. To pull all of their multidimensional data into a SQL Server data lake for consolidated reporting, they leaned on CData SSIS Components.

CData SSIS Components are tailor-made for SSIS and specifically engineered to make the most out of each multidimensional service. With the variety of CData SSIS Components available, the organization was able to connect to all of their disparate analytics services in exactly the same way using SQL. They can now design and build data flow pipelines that easily deploy to Azure Data Factory (ADF) to run and maintain their pipelines in the cloud.

Learn more about building a data flow in SSIS for Google Analytics in our Knowledge Base article:

Import Google Analytics Data into SQL Server using SSIS

Getting Started

Follow any of the links below to learn more about our analytics and multidimensional connectivity solutions and download a free 30-day trial.