Proactive caching. The UDM provides caching services that you can configure to reflect business and technical requirements—including realtime, or near realtime, access to data while maintaining high performance. The goal of proactive caching is to provide the performance of traditional OLAP stores while retaining the immediacy and ease of management of direct access to underlying data sources. Various UDM policy settings control the caching behavior, balancing the business needs for performance with an acceptable degree of latency. Examples of possible caching policies might be
- "Answer all queries by using the latest, realtime data."
- "A 20-minute latency in the data is acceptable. Where possible, use a cache that's automatically maintained based on change notifications received from underlying data sources. If at any point the cache is more than 20 minutes out-of-date, answer all further queries directly from the underlying source until the cache is refreshed."
- "Always use a cache. Periodically refresh the cache, avoiding peak-load times on the underlying sources."
The UDM also provides a flexible, role-based security model, letting you secure data down to a fine level of granularity. And Yukon will include a full set of enterprise-class tools for developing and managing UDMs. The development tools, including an MDX query editor and an MDX debugger, are integrated with other SQL Server tools for building reports and Data Transformation Services (DTS) packages as well as with Visual Studio .NET.
One Model for Reporting and Analysis
The UDM combines the best of traditional OLAP and relational reporting, providing a single model that you can use as the basis for all your reporting and analysis needs. This flexible model allows data access across multiple heterogeneous data sources, including OLTP databases and data warehouses. And through the UDM, users can access all data, including the lowest level of transaction detail. With the UDM's proactive caching, you can define policies to balance performance versus the need for realtime, or near realtime, information—without having to explicitly manage a separate Multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP) store. In addition, you can define a rich end-user model, including complex analytic calculations, to support interactive and managed reporting. Watch SQL Server Magazine for more details about the UDM and other Yukon Analysis Services enhancements.