SQL, Analysis Services OR Reporting Services

Question

I have a requirement and I am not sure if I should use Analysis services or Reporting services or some other technique.

My client wants to show special deals from a database on their online website. They want to target users, ie if user is from UK; show deals for UK and in Pound. if user is from Canada; show deals for Canada and in canadian dollar etc.

Their database has multiple tables loaded with 1 to 2 million records in each table. Each table is for a different category of products and has a currency and a Country column to filter. I cannot restructure their schema as they have huge amount of development done to integrate with various buisness applications.

I need a solution which involves datawarehouse, can fetch data quickly and cache it for next 12 or 24 hours (Do not want to cache on web server). I do not have much experience in Analysis and Reporting services so I need your solution/suggestion and anything you can share from your good or bad experiences.

Answer 1

Analysis services is not what you want here: you do not need cubes that summerize info. Nor is reporting services: you will want to display your data in plain HTML.

I would just query the existing data and display that data. If performance becomes an issue you could run an SSIS job every 12 hours to extract data to a specific database you created for this application. But consider tweaking your indexes first.