Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

Chapter 24. Financial Scenarios

The end point of many data warehousing scenarios is to produce actionable business intelligence from a financial aspect. Whether you are talking about inventory, Web Analytics, advertising, or healthcare, there is some financial component (cost of goods, money earned) that requires you to calculate the return on investment for spending money in the first place.

The purpose of this chapter is to go through various financial scenarios. An exhaustive review of all financial tools is beyond the scope of this chapter. But a review of some key financial scenarios from the standpoint of Analysis Services are reviewed, including:

• Presenting budget information including date comparative analysis, trend analysis, usage of KPI, and variance analysis.

• Reviewing currency conversion scenarios that involve the use of many-to-many dimensions.

• Reviewing precision considerations when working with Analysis Services.

• Reviewing employee parent/child dimension scenarios.

• Reviewing custom rollup scenarios including parent/child dimensions and unary operators and custom member formulas.

All of the examples in this chapter reference the Adventure Works Data Warehouse Enterprise sample, which you can download from www.codeplex.com/. You can search for SQL Samples. Refer to the SQL Server Product samples and you should be able to find the Adventure Works relational data warehouse as well as the AS project so you can build your own cube.

This chapter uses trend analysis and comparative ...