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

Adding measures


Measures are crucial when building Analysis Services cubes. They are quantifiable values usually tied to a column in a fact table. The most common method of defining measures is to use aggregate functions such as sum, min, max, distinct count, and count on a numeric column. A measure can also be defined using an expression that calculates values using an MDX statement—this is called calculated measures.

The fact table that has been used throughout this book called FactInternetSales contains several columns that describe different facts about an individual transaction. So far in this book you have worked with the Sales Amount measure that describes the sales amount for an individual order row. The FactInternetSales table also contains information about the order quantity, the price, the discount amount, and other measures that are included in the transaction. These columns are interesting when analyzing the sales information; all we need to do is to add them to our measure...