Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

8.4. Dimension Intelligence Using the Business Intelligence Wizard

The Business Intelligence Wizard contains multiple features, but we will focus on three of the more commonly applicable ones in this chapter: Account Intelligence, Time Intelligence, and Dimension Intelligence. Analysis Services 2008 natively supports the Account dimension type in the engine. In this way, Analysis Services is able to aggregate data for members in Account dimensions based on account names. The Time Intelligence feature creates calculations for common business questions, such as year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter revenue. Analysis Services 2008 enables support for these calculations natively so that all client and custom tools can take advantage of these calculations. The Dimension Intelligence feature allows you to map your dimension to commonly used dimension types, so that client tools can discover and present them to customers in a way that is easily interpreted.

8.4.1. Account Intelligence

In Chapter 6 you learned about measures and aggregation functions that are specified for measures such as Sum, Count, and Distinct Count. Analysis Services 2008 supports calculations specifically for the Account dimension type so that an appropriate aggregation function is applied based on account names. In fact, there is a special type of aggregation function called ByAccount. Based on the type of account, Analysis Services can apply the right aggregation function. The Account Intelligence Wizard allows ...