Professional SQL Server™ Analysis Services 2005 with MDX

11.1. Updating Dimension Data in UDM

There are several circumstances where dimension data requires an update. If an organization is selling products, then adding new products to the catalog may end up on the "to do" list and hence the changes need to be reflected in the product dimension. You might come up with new promotions for a holiday season line to increase your sales and hence need to update data in your promotions dimension. One of the most common scenarios is changing data for employees. As new employees join the organization their information needs to be added to the appropriate dimension. Or existing employees' information might have to be updated due to a change in properties of the employees. Analysis Services 2005 allows you to change the dimension data through the BIDS as well as SSMS. In order to update the dimension data, the dimension first needs to be write-enabled, which means the users with write permissions on the dimension can update data. You learned the basics of dimension writeback in Chapter 8, and in this chapter you learn dimension writeback through a user scenerio.

In this section you learn how to add, delete, and update dimension members using the dimension writeback technique. Before you start implementing the scenario, you should understand that certain pre- requisites must be addressed to write data to a dimension. These prerequisites are as follows:

1. The dimension property WriteEnable needs to be set to True. This can be done in BIDS.

2. The dimension ...