Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

9.3. Adding Calculations to Your Cube

In Chapter 3, you learned about the calculation model in Analysis Services 2008 and the concept of MDX scripts. In Chapter 6, you learned how to use the Calculations tab in the Cube Designer for creating calculated members and named sets. In this section, you learn how to review and test cell calculations.

You use the Calculations tab in the Cube Designer to define all calculations, which then become part of the MDX script of your cube. In this section, you continue using the Adventure Works DW 2008 Analysis Services sample project to explore the functionality available in the Calculations tab.

The following steps show how to review the definitions of some of the calculations defined in the Adventure Works sample cube and how to verify the results as the calculations are applied to the specific cells:

1. Open the Adventure Works DW 2008 Analysis Services sample project and, if you haven't done so already, deploy the project to the Analysis Services instance on your machine. If you have a default Analysis Services instance, you can deploy the project without changing the project properties. However, if you have installed named instances of Analysis Services and SQL Server you must change the project's deployment properties to target the right instance of Analysis Services and you must also change the relational data source in the project to point to your SQL Server instance.

2. Open the Adventure Works cube and click the Calculations tab. You will ...