Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services with MDX and DAX

Chapter 8

Advanced Dimension Design

What's in this chapter?

• Understanding custom hierarchy rollups
• Taking a look at enhancements to parent-child hierarchies
• Reviewing unary operators
• Customizing dimension through properties
• Using the Business Intelligence Wizards
• Taking a look at dimension writeback

In this chapter you learn to enhance dimensions to aggregate data up to the parent member through custom rollup (aggregate) operations, and to change dimension and hierarchy properties to customize dimensions for the needs of the end users. For example, you would normally expect data to be aggregated along a dimension from a child to its parent. If you have a hierarchy such as Time, then sales per month will typically be rolled up to calculate first the sales of a quarter, and sales of a quarter will be rolled up to calculate the sales of a year. Even though this is the most common way a user would expect the data to be aggregated, there are dimensions in which the data does not get rolled up by a simple sum. You also learn about the Business Intelligence Wizard, which helps you to enhance cubes and dimensions with logic and structure needed to solve common business problems. Finally, you are introduced to dimension writeback, which is a way to enable changes to the dimension structure.

Consider first the details you learned regarding dimension design in Chapter 5; you learned that dimensions are made up of hierarchies, which in turn consist of tiers called levels. The two types of ...