OLE DB for OLAP Concepts
In OLE DB for OLAP, the implementation of specialized schema rowsets is a powerful way of exposing schema information and navigating through multidimensional data stores. You can use these special schema rowsets to browse metadata objects, cache the schema information, and manage the hierarchical structures in your data.
The cube is a central concept in OLE DB for OLAP, and three types of cubes are significant when discussing schema information: virtual cubes, hypercubes, and multicubes. A cube is always represented by a dataset object. The dataset object is created from the OLE DB command object by using multidimensional expressions (MDX) in the context of a multidimensional provider (MDP). The dataset object encapsulates the multidimensional result set returned by the MDP; this result set consists of a set of axes with defined data points, or coordinates, along each axis.
Note
Defined in this specification, MDX is a language, more precisely a set of macros, built on top of SQL that provides the means to retrieve and manipulate the data. Although introduced in this section because it of its relationship with the dataset object, MDX is fully described in Multidimensional Expressions and its syntax is presented in MDX Grammer.
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