Knight's Microsoft® Business Intelligence 24-Hour Trainer: Leveraging Microsoft SQL Server® Integration, Analysis, and Reporting Services with Excel® and SharePoint®

Editing Your Dimension

Now that you have your cube deployed, the first thing to start working on is the dimensions.

In SQL Server 2008, by default, only the dimension’s primary key will be added as an attri-

bute. All other attributes will need to be added manually. You’ll also need to set the keys for

each of the attributes and configure any attributes’ relationships.

Nothing will find data integrity issues in your dimensions better than an SSAS project. As you

deploy your project to the instance, SSAS runs a number of queries to determine the distinct

records and the uniqueness of each key. Any problems with this process or with foreign key

violations will cause the cube not to be able to process and require you to go back to SSIS to

correct those issues.

In this lesson, you’ll add to the project from the last lesson. If you skipped that

lesson, you can download Lesson13Complete.zip from this lesson’s download

on

www.wrox.com and deploy the project.

DIMENSION EDITOR

You’ll start editing any dimension in the Dimension Editor, which you can access by double-

clicking the .dim file in the Solution Explorer window. For this example, I’m going to use the

Date.dim dimension file that you created in the last lesson’s Cube Wizard. Once in the editor

you’ll want to determine which attributes your users will want to use to slice and dice, and

drag those over to the Attributes pane on the left from ...