Professional SQL Server™ Analysis Services 2005 with MDX

8.4. Dimension Intelligence using the Business Intelligence Wizard

Analysis Services 2005 provides you with a Business Intelligence wizard that allows you to enhance your dimensions with appropriate calculations added to your cube. Three specific enhancements are discussed in this section: Account intelligence, Time intelligence, and Dimension intelligence. Analysis Services 2005 supports the Account dimension natively in the engine. In this way, Analysis Services is able to aggregate data for members in the Account dimension based on the account names. The Time intelligence enhancement creates calculations for common business questions, such as year-over-year or quarter-over-quarter revenue. Such calculations are typically created as session calculated measures by various client tools in Analysis Services 2000. Analysis Services 2005 enables support of these calculations natively, so that all client tools and custom tools can take advantage of these calculations. The Dimension intelligence enhancement allows you to map your dimension to commonly used dimension types, so that client tools can discover and present them to customers in a unique 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 2005 supports calculations specifically for the Account dimension so that an appropriate aggregation function is applied based ...