I'm looking a SQL Server's Analysis Services. It looks pretty good but I can't seem to find a straight answer to something.

Does Analysis Services have its own data engine, or does it use the engine of the DBMS it's connected to (i.e. Sql Server, Oracle, DB2)?

MS lists it as a "middle-tier server for online analytical processing and data mining". This indicates it acts as a data manager using OLE DB to link to a DBMS which performs the actual data manipultaion. This is how DTS works, but MS (nor anyone else) does not readily admit to this. Almost everything I've read about DTS *implies* that DTS does its own data work.

On the other hand, "Analysis Services provides server capabilities to create and manage OLAP cubes...". Since a data cube is essentially a set of aggregations of base data, creating a cube implies some kind of innate database functionality.

So which is it? Does Analysis Services have its own built in data engine or is it a big fancy OLE DB consumer?

TIA
Thom C.