Programming Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2008

Building Your First Cube

Now that you can imagine the design and implementation of fact tables and dimension tables, how do you go about creating a cube? Let’s go over the steps required to do this now.

Preparing Star Schema Objects

For the purposes of this chapter, rather than using the sample data warehouse and cubes based on the AdventureWorks2008 sample database for Analysis Services, we’d like to create our own from scratch. This gives us a chance to try things out on our own. For this example, we’ll use the older Northwind SQL Server sample database since it has no precreated cube set. The Management Studio solution in the sample code for this chapter, available on the book’s companion Web site, contains several SQL scripts that create a fact ...