Reports using Cube or Relational Database..some points to consider

We should try and use cube and not relational database for building SSRS reports. Here are the some of the advantages that cube has over relational database –

1. Cube is much faster source for canned and ad-hoc reporting. Reason, aggregated and processed data is stored in cube database (of course if implemented using MOLAP).
2. Information or the measures are organized in a way which is easy to build excel pivot table which business user can easily understand.
3. It is very easy to implement hierarchy and drill down using cube and MDX compared with Relational database and SQL queries.
4. With cube we can use power of MDX to build complex reports, like YTD, Running total, Semi additive measure, trend, parallel period etc.
5. Calculated measures can be stored in the cube and can be used by developer to build report or business user browsing them directly using any client application or excel. Other hand we never store calculated column in the relational database table.
6. Even ad-hoc reporting becomes handy and easy with cube as some of the client software like ProClarity only work with cube.
7. Using cube we can easily get different view of a measure using linked dimensions. Say spend by vendor, location etc.
8. However not all the report should be build using the cube. For example, detail reports where we want to view detail data as they were pulled from the source system, we should use SQL report. In this case we are not making use of aggregated data from the cube and SQL query can returns the detail rows much master than MDX.