Connect to SQL Analysis Services Data in Aqua Data Studio

The CData JDBC Driver for SQL Analysis Services integrates SQL Analysis Services data with wizards and analytics in IDEs like Aqua Data Studio. This article shows how to connect to SQL Analysis Services data through the connection manager and execute queries.

Create a JDBC Data Source

You can use the connection manager to define connection properties and save them in a new JDBC data source. The SQL Analysis Services data source can then be accessed from Aqua Data Studio tools.

1. In Aqua Data Studio, select Register Server from the Servers menu.
2. In the Register Server form, select the 'Generic - JDBC' connection.
3. Enter the following JDBC connection properties:
   • Name: Enter a name for the data source; for example, SQL Analysis Services.
   • Driver Location: Click the Browse button and select the cdata.jdbc.ssas.jar file, located in the lib subfolder of the installation directory.
   • Driver: Enter the Driver's class name, cdata.jdbc.ssas.SSASDriver.

   • URL: Enter the JDBC URL, which starts with jdbc:ssas: and is followed by a semicolon-separated list of connection properties.

     To connect, provide authentication and set the Url property to a valid SQL Server Analysis Services endpoint. You can connect to SQL Server Analysis Services instances hosted over HTTP with XMLA access. See the Microsoft documentation to configure HTTP access to SQL Server Analysis Services.

     To secure connections and authenticate, set the corresponding connection properties, below. The data provider supports the major authentication schemes, including HTTP and Windows, as well as SSL/TLS.

     • HTTP Authentication

       Set AuthScheme to "Basic" or "Digest" and set User and Password. Specify other authentication values in CustomHeaders.

     • Windows (NTLM)

       Set the Windows User and Password and set AuthScheme to "NTLM".

     • Kerberos and Kerberos Delegation

       To authenticate with Kerberos, set AuthScheme to NEGOTIATE. To use Kerberos delegation, set AuthScheme to KERBEROSDELEGATION. If needed, provide the User, Password, and KerberosSPN. By default, the data provider attempts to communicate with the SPN at the specified Url.

     • SSL/TLS:

       By default, the data provider attempts to negotiate SSL/TLS by checking the server's certificate against the system's trusted certificate store. To specify another certificate, see the SSLServerCert property for the available formats.

     You can then access any cube as a relational table: When you connect the data provider retrieves SSAS metadata and dynamically updates the table schemas. Instead of retrieving metadata every connection, you can set the CacheLocation property to automatically cache to a simple file-based store.

     See the Getting Started section of the CData documentation, under Retrieving Analysis Services Data, to execute SQL-92 queries to the cubes.

     Built-in Connection String Designer

     For assistance in constructing the JDBC URL, use the connection string designer built into the SQL Analysis Services JDBC Driver. Either double-click the JAR file or execute the jar file from the command-line.

     java -jar cdata.jdbc.ssas.jar
     

     Fill in the connection properties and copy the connection string to the clipboard.

     👁 Using the built-in connection string designer to generate a JDBC URL (Salesforce is shown.)
     A typical JDBC URL is below:

     jdbc:ssas:User=myuseraccount;Password=mypassword;URL=http://localhost/OLAP/msmdpump.dll;

   👁 The JDBC data source, defined by the JAR path, driver class, and JDBC URL. (QuickBooks is shown.)
   

Query SQL Analysis Services Data

You can now query the tables exposed.