Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

Chapter 21. Designing Real-Time Cubes

Are you ready to create real-time cubes? Or perhaps you would be if only you knew what real-time cubes were? We define real-time cubes as cubes that are configured for automatic data updates on a time scale that makes them appear to be working in real time. This can be profoundly useful for certain types of analytical applications. First, consider an application for which real-time cubes would not be useful: An application designed to create profit projections and economic analysis of harvesting an old growth forest (a renewable resource) — that would require updates, say, every five years or so to reflect macroeconomic trends. There is a much more exciting application that would exploit real-time techniques. Consider a case such that your cube is directly built against your transactional data that has several transactions per second, which need to be updated in your cube so that users can query the data real time. With the use of real-time streaming stock quotes of your company, results of a business analysis could be fed into a digital dashboard for viewing results. Okay, it is an unlikely example, but you get the idea. Such a dashboard might house multiple Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), clearly indicating the performance of target metrics with changes in color or graphics displays based on the data. Attaching the real-time stock quote stream to analyze the constantly changing cube and/or dimensions can be done through a .NET stored ...