SAS/EIS Software: Administrator's Guide

What Is the Multidimensional Data Provider?

SAS/EIS software enables users to build applications based on high-level components, such as viewers (pre-built reports), data models, and metadata. The Multidimensional Data Provider (MDP) is a data model that accesses a variety of data structures in a distributed environment. These data structures include SAS data sets, multidimensional databases (MDDBs), views on external relational database management system (RDBMS) files, star schemas, and output data sets from PROC SUMMARY. The MDP runs from multiple data sources. It allows you to split multidimensional databases both horizontally (storing different aggregation levels in different locations) and vertically (storing new data in separate files).

You can use the MDP as an extension to the SAS/EIS multidimensional data model, thus enabling SAS/EIS OLAP applications to access transparently any data that has been distributed optimally. The MDP increases the power and efficiency of SAS/EIS multidimensional applications that process large amounts of data, and it also adds scalability and full compute server processing.

You should consider using MDP if any of the following situations exists:

if the amount of data is too large to be handled within one MDDB
if there is a performance bottleneck when accessing data on a server
if you want to make use of existing summarized data sources.
if you want to secure your investment in OLAP applications by
- providing for scalability as data volumes grow
- maintaining flexibility in your choice of data storage format and location.

To take full advantage of MDP, you should have a moderate to advanced knowlege of the development features of the SAS System.

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