Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Analysis Services Step by Step

Creating Virtual Cubes

If you’re familiar with a relational database system, you’ve encountered views (or queries, as views are known in Microsoft Access). In a relational database, a view is a mechanism for combining values from multiple tables into what appears to be a single table, or it’s a mechanism for filtering the rows or columns of a table to see only a part of the table. In Analysis Services, a virtual cube provides some of the functions of a relational view.

A virtual cube, however, is much more restrictive than a relational view. In a relational view, you can combine essentially any two tables into a single view, and you can create extremely flexible filters to restrict the rows seen in the view. When you use a virtual cube to restrict ...