Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

5.10. Summary

Using the Dimension Wizard and other wizards in BIDS is only the starting point for designing objects in Analysis Services 2008. For optimal results, you will need to fine-tune what those wizards produce. At the beginning of each episode of the television serial The Outer Limits the viewers were exhorted to not adjust their television set. Just the opposite is true with Analysis Services 2008, because you do need to refine your objects created by the Dimension and Cube Wizards. A couple of examples are using the Properties window to assign descriptive names to an attribute that might otherwise harbor some obscure name coming from a source database and defining attribute relationships to optimize dimension performance. More profoundly, you can use the Dimension Designer to create translations for the attributes and hierarchies of a dimension into another language.

In addition to learning about dimensions, you learned the necessity of deploying your dimension to the instance of Analysis Services where the dimension is processed by retrieving the data from the data source. Processing is essential to enable the user to browse a dimension. The communication between BIDS and an instance of Analysis Services is accomplished through a SOAP-based XML API called XMLA (XML for Analysis), which is an industry standard. Even more interesting is that dimensions stored in Analysis Services are represented internally as cubes — one-dimensional cubes; and, what a coincidence, cubes ...