LINQ to Azure Analysis Services Data

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Azure Analysis Services ADO.NET Provider

Rapidly create and deploy powerful .NET applications that integrate with Azure Analysis Services.

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LINQ provides general-purpose query facilities in .NET Framework 3.0 and above and provides one easy way to programmatically access data through from CData ADO.NET Data Providers. This example uses LINQ to access information from the Azure Analysis Services Data Provider.

This article demonstrates how to use LINQ to access Azure Analysis Services tables through the CData ADO.NET Data Provider for Azure Analysis Services. To do this you will LINQ to Entity Framework, which is used to generate the connection and can be used with any CData ADO.NET Data Providers to access data via LINQ.

See the help documentation for a guide to setting up an EF 6 project to use the provider.

  1. In a new project in Visual Studio, right-click on the project and choose to add a new item. Add an ADO.NET Entity Data Model.
  2. Choose EF Designer from Database and click Next.
  3. Add a new Data Connection, and change your data source type to "CData Azure Analysis Services Data Source".

  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    To connect to Azure Analysis Services, set the Url property to a valid server, for instance, asazure://southcentralus.asazure.windows.net/server, in addition to authenticating. Optionally, set Database to distinguish which Azure database on the server to connect to.

    Azure Analysis Services uses the OAuth authentication standard. OAuth requires the authenticating user to interact with Azure Analysis Services using the browser. You can connect without setting any connection properties for your user credentials. See the Help documentation for more information.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    URL=asazure://REGION.asazure.windows.net/server;InitiateOAuth=GETANDREFRESH
  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting AASEntities as our entity connection in App.Config.
  6. Enter a model name and select any tables or views you would like to include in the model.

Using the entity you created, you can now perform select commands. For example:

AASEntities context = new AASEntities(); var customerQuery = from customer in context.Customer select customer; foreach (var result in customerQuery) { Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.Country); }

See "LINQ and Entity Framework" chapter in the help documentation for example queries of the supported LINQ.