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I am pretty sure that most of you would have heard or read about this at least once in your SSAS career, but how many of you actually do set slices for your partitions? Well, I am also guilty of the charge and seldom did set slices till a recent issue. Situation : Duh, that’s strange! It’s a sunny day...
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While using a cube in SSAS is usually a great source for reporting, it is not always the best choice. Sometimes it is better to report off of the data warehouse that the cube is built from. For example, say you want to create a P&L statement using a financial cube. You want it to look like a normal...
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Here is a situation I ran into recently concerning using a fact table in SSAS. This experience may help you out if you run into something similar: A data warehouse has an advertising table that has these four fields: Product Type, Inches, Lines, Pieces. The Inches, Lines and Pieces fields will only have...
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As your SSAS cube gets bigger, cube processing time will become a problem. This is especially true as more and more companies want cube processing during the day instead of the usual off-hours time when no one is using the cube. Partitioning the cube can help to reduce the processing time. So can using...
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Do you know how it feels like to hear an old song and have a whole lot of memories come flooding back to you? Well, something sort of similar happened to me today. I was doing my weekly reading and going through a brilliant post by Microsoft MVP - Greg Galloway ( blog ). That was when I noticed that...
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Christmas time is one of my most favourite times of the year – the time when you can just lay back, relax, enjoy some quality time with your family and catch up with your old friends. While this Christmas time has been a little hectic for me considering that I changed my base from London, UK to Charlotte...
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A few months ago, I had a post, SSAS #21 – Steps to create a SSRS report with MDX accessing a Cube . If you have worked on creating SSRS reports accessing cubes for a little while, you already knew that my post really doesn’t help you much in terms of solving real problems in your work. The...
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A factless fact table is a fact table that does not have any measures. It is essentially an intersection of dimensions (it contains nothing but dimensional keys). There are two types of factless tables: One is for capturing an event, and one is for describing conditions. An event establishes the relationship...
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These are my favorite SSAS white papers released by Microsoft, with many from SQLCAT . I’ll keep this post updated with new versions of the white papers as well as new ones that come along that I find useful: Analysis Services 2008 R2 Performance Guide SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services Operations...
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Dimensions are often recycled for multiple purposes within the same database. For instance, a “Date” dimension can be used for “Date of Sale”, as well as “Date of Delivery”, or “Date of Hire”. This is often referred to as a “role-playing dimension”...
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A conformed dimension is a dimension that has the same meaning to every fact with which it relates. Conformed dimensions allow facts and measures to be categorized and described in the same way across multiple facts and/or data marts, ensuring consistent reporting across the enterprise. A conformed dimension...
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A reference dimension occurs when the key column for the dimension is joined indirectly to the fact table through a key in another dimension table. This results in a snowflake schema design. The following figure shows one fact table named InternetSales , and two dimension tables called Customer (regular...
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Degenerate dimensions, also called fact dimensions, are standard dimensions that are constructed from attribute columns in fact tables instead of from attribute columns in dimension tables. This is because useful dimensional data is sometimes stored in a fact table to reduce duplication, especially when...
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In SSAS, data structures do not always conform to the snowflake or star schema model where one fact is associated with a single dimension member. For example, consider the example of financial transactions in accounts that can have one or more customers. This can be modeled as: The relationship between...
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Another must read white-paper: Analysis Services 2008 R2 Performance Guide . This white paper describes how business intelligence developers can apply query and processing performance-tuning techniques to their Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services OLAP solutions. It applies to SQL Server 2005...