I have been working on a business intelligence project using Microsoft Analysis Services (AS) for quite some time and now we are getting close to the final roll out date. One of the problems that has been on the todo list is that some of the users were getting "failed to get data" errors from the Office 2003 Web Components (OWC) that we are using for presenting the data. Below is the error that PivotChart OWC was showing:

Failed to get data. If available, errors returned from the provider are listed below.

And thats it! The provider didn’t return any errors so I have no idea about actual errors. Seaching on google didn’t return any useful results so once again I was on my own :-/. After spending some time thinking about what could be causing the problem I ended up at the cube-level permission dialog box. I noticed that the "Enforce on" property for all the roles were set to "Client." Knowing that the OWC were pretty thin clients I decided to try enforcing the permissions on the server and guess what? This time the data provider actually returned an error:

Failed to get data. If available, errors returned from the provider are listed below.
* Safety settings on this machine prohibit accessing a data source on another domain

Now that is so much more helpful! So if you are in the same situation then make sure that you enforce the permissions on the server. To do this:

  1. Right click on the database in Analysis Services
  2. Click "Manage Roles…"
  3. Make sure that the "Enforce On" column has "Server" for the desired roles

Knowing that it was a security issue I just asked the admins to adjust the permissions accordingly for all the users and on towards the next hurdle! 🙂

Back to blog...