Book Image

Getting Started with SQL Server 2012 Cube Development

Book Image

Getting Started with SQL Server 2012 Cube Development

Overview of this book

Analysis Services have been the number one OLAP engine for years. With the increased focus on business intelligence solutions, there is a shortage of professionals in this area. Start your journey into becoming a BI developer using the popular tools included in every SQL Server installation. Getting Started with SQL Server 2012 Cube Development teaches you through clear step-by-step exercises to create business intelligence solutions using Analysis Services. The knowledge gained through these practical examples can immediately be applied to your real-world problems. Getting Started with SQL Server 2012 Cube Development begins with an introduction to business intelligence and Analysis Services, the world's most-used cube engine. Guiding you through easy-to-understand examples to become a cube developer. Learn how to create a cube including all the advanced features such as KPIs, calculated measures, and time intelligence. Security and performance tuning will also be explored. You will learn how to perform and automate core tasks like deployment and processing. The main focus is on multidimensional cubes, but the creation of in-memory models will also be covered. You will learn everything you need to get started with cube development using SQL Server 2012.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Getting Started with SQL Server 2012 Cube Development
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Connecting Excel to the FirstCube cube


In my examples, I will use Excel 2013 Professional, as this contains some features that are very interesting to users who wish to use Excel as their query tool.

To use Excel as the query tool against the cube, follow the given steps:

  1. Open up Excel and create a new empty workbook.

  2. Go to the tab named Data and click on the From Other Sources button to create a connection to Analysis Services. Click on the From Analysis Services button.

  3. In the Connect to Database Server dialog, type the name of the server and instance; if you have followed in this book when installing the server it should be localhost\multidimensional. Then click on Next.

  4. Choose the FirstCube database and click on Finish.

  5. Choose to create a PivotTable Report and click on OK. Now you have an empty OLAP PivotTable connected to the FirstCube database and the Adventure Works DW2012 cube.

  6. In the PivotTable Field list, drag the Sales Amount measure and drop it in the Values field.

  7. Drag the Product Hierarchy...