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A colleague of mine ran into a peculiar problem with her cube. She deployed it just fine and didn't get any error messages. Still, there was a problem. She could see the dimensions in her SSAS project just fine. She could see her cube as well. But she couldn't see any of her measure cubes. So what was the problem? She was missing the calculate statement from her cube. If you look in the BIDS at your cube on the Calculations tab with a Script View, you'll be able to see that the first...
I wrote a post a while back about the pros and cons of developing a Report Model based on a cube . I got two comments on it telling me to check out Intelligencia . I decided to look into it, and what can I say? I'm impressed... Intelligencia is an add - in to Visual Studio which helps you build Reporting Services Reports on top of a cube. Those of you who have tried doing that in the past with what there is, probably remember that it wasn't terribly comfortable all of the time... First example...
I found myself revisiting the Parent Child dimension quite unexpectedly. I'm working on a project which involves the division of the city to different statistical areas. The division of the city into these different statistical areas happens once every 10 years or so, according to the changes in population tracked by the municipality itself and the government in the Census of Population and Housing. Up till now, my cube had in it just the statistical areas distribution from one Census onwards...
Almost every post I made about Report Builder, be it the pros and cons of creating a report model on a cube or refining a report model based on a cube, brought the same question - what makes reports based on a report model to break and how can you avoid it? Well I didn't know the answer as I admit it never happened to me, (sigh of relief), but the question did bother me enough for me to try and research it a bit more on the internet. And yes, I'm happy to say there is more than enough information...
Creating a Report Model based on an Analysis Cube – Pros and Cons If you follow my blog, you probably know by now that I developed a report model based on the Analysis Services cube I already had. I even got around to updating the report model . And then, my users started using it. And you know, whatever we do just seems so wonderful to us, until our users find all sorts of flaws with what we did… so yes, my users did open my eyes to quite a few problems that may occur when you build...
Well I thought today we'd go over visual totals in MDX and also see how they may have an impact on how you assign role based security in you SSAS project. Visual Totals in MDX are there to give you just what they describe – a sum on the children in a certain set. Child members which are not in the specified set will be ignored during the calculation. For instance, if I have a set that consists of: USA, New York, Washington and California, when I look at the total for USA, I will only see it's...
I have recently discovered a brand tool to help me better understand my work. It's a free tool from the Microsoft SDK . Specifically, I'm talking about the Rowset Viewer . The Rowset Viewer was intended for you to "view and manipulate OLE DB rowsets, with the added ability to call and manipulate other OLE DB methods from the data source, session, command, rowset, transaction, and notification objects supported by any OLE DB provider." I found myself using the tool so as to understand...
Well I guess congratulations are in order because I finally got around to using a report builder in my project. Turns out that building a report model based on a cube is as easy as 1-2-3. Still I had a problem, as for some unknown reason the translations were showing for my dimension names and my measures, but not for the dimension's attributes... At first I thought maybe this is a problem solved by Service Pack 2 (as my tests were done on a Server with Service Pack 1). Alas, no. So, a further...
A Parent - Child Dimension is a special sort of dimension, to be used in case: You have data even for non – leaf members. For instance, you may have set – up costs allocated for the Category level (the higher level), but profit data for your Product level (the lower level). You have an unbalanced hierarchy. The classic example for this might be the Geographical Hierarchy which at times might look like: Country > State > City, and at other times like Country > City. For an international company...
You can browse a cube through the cube browser in Analysis Services or through the one in the Management Studio. I usually use the one in the Management Studio, as it gives your more space to look. In the cube I created in Analysis Services, I added a Budget hierarchy in my Budget dimension. I decided to check the data for the new hierarchy in comparison to the money that was assigned to it in the Budget fact table. And it was problematic… I was opening the Budget hierarchy and in the first 3 levels...
Panorama Nova View Analytics is a viewer on a cube which enables you to drag and drop attributes and measures onto a grid, so as to study the influences different slicers and dicers have on a measure. Each combination of slicers and dicers with a certain measure, can be saved as a presentation (the name in Panorama for a dynamic report). The presentation is dynamic, as you can change not only the filters on the existing attributes (as in Reporting Services), but also add new attributes and remove...
I thought this time around, we'll discuss how solve order can affect your MDX calculations. I found that people tend to ignore this property, as it is not mentioned in the "Form View" of the Calculation Tab of the cube (which is what people usually tend to use when they write MDX for a cube. I hope this will be taken into consideration in SQL Server 2008). Now, this is a shame, as solve order can greatly affect your calculations. For each calculation you do in MDX, you can specify the optional property...
There are quite a few ways of ways of documenting the changes a business entity goes through over time. The most famous of them all (and the most difficult to build) is a Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD) type 2. doing this in a table, you would create a table which would include: an incremental key, the business key, the attributes you'd like to track for that entity, a start date and an end date (for which the information was right) and a flag which would equal 1 when we are looking at the last...
So today's post will be about the usage of the many to many relationship that can reside between two dimensions. Quoting from the definition of Dimension Relationships , I would note that "Dimension usage defines the relationships between cube dimensions and the measure groups in a dimension…The many-to-many dimension relationship defines an association between a dimension and a measure group by specifying an intermediate fact table that is joined to the dimension table". Now I know the usual example...
Well, continuing our story about strange things that can happen, I thought I'd share with you this little tidbit. I was taking over a project from someone who had left the company a while back. In the cube that was on the old server, there was an MDX calculation. Only thing was that calculation was missing from the project on the new server (and I admit I couldn't guess what was behind it). So what can you do when you need something that in a project of an old cube? You import the project back to...