Professional SQL Server™ Analysis Services 2005 with MDX

5.2. Working with the Dimension Editor

The Dimension Designer, shown in Figure 5-13, is an important tool that helps you to refine the dimension hierarchies created by the Dimension Wizard. You can define the properties such as unary operators, custom roll-ups, and so forth which help you to define how data should be aggregated for cells referred to by members of hierarchies in the dimension. The Dimension Designer itself is composed of three main window panes called Attributes, Hierarchies and Levels, and the DSV. In addition to that you have the toolbar, which contains several icons that help you to enhance the dimension. The Attributes pane shows all the attributes, the Hierarchies and Levels pane shows all the hierarchies along with the levels, and the DSV pane shows the tables that are part of the dimension. If you hover over each one of the icons you will be able to see the functionality that is supported by the icon. Some of the icons are the same as the ones you saw in the DSV and are used for operations within the dimension DSV. The functionality of the remaining icons is discussed later in this chapter and in Chapter 8.

Figure 5.13. Figure 5-13

5.2.1. Attributes

Attributes are hierarchies that only have two levels; the All level and another level that has the name of the attribute that contains all the members. Each attribute directly corresponds to a column in the ...