In this article we will return to the hands-on design and building of cubes for various business purposes. Specifically, the next two articles will focus on the design and construction of a Web Site Traffic Analysis Cube. In this, Part I, after a brief discussion of potential business reasons for collecting web site traffic data, we will design and build an extract procedure, to illustrate one approach for entraining statistical data for ultimate placement into our new traffic analysis cube. Next, we will set up a simple data source that will serve as the destination point for the extract process, and as a basis for the design and creation of a web traffic analysis cube in Part II. Finally, we will browse our cube using the Analysis Services browser to examine the results of our handiwork.

In this lesson, we will return to an examination of real-life applications that can leverage the power of Analysis Services. The scenario that we explore in this article will concern itself with the business need of a web site owner to analyze traffic.

The topics within Part I of this two-part article will include:

• An overview of the business needs behind the desire to report upon web site traffic statistics;
• An overview of the Server Access Log, and a discussion of its use as a source of web site activity tracking data;
• A practical demonstration of the extraction of sample traffic statistics raw data from a log file, and it's importation into a database using MS SQL Server 2000 Data Transformation Services ("DTS");
• Creation and population of a table in MSSQL Server 2000 to support our site traffic analysis cube in Part II.

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About the Series:

This article is a member of the series Introduction to MSSQL Server 2000 Analysis Services. The series is designed to provide hands-on application of the fundamentals of MS SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services, with each installment progressively adding features and techniques designed to meet specific real - world needs. For more information on the series, as well as the hardware / software requirements to prepare for the exercises we will undertake, please see my initial article, Creating Our First Cube.

Analysis Services, DTS, Data Transformation Services, Access Log, Traffic analysis, Web Site, Statistics, Data Connection, OLAP, Import, Business Intelligence, Query, Navigation, Member, Drill down, Format

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