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

Creating calculations


A key capability of the tabular mode is the ability to easily create calculations; these calculations could either be created as measures or KPIs that will be evaluated and calculated at the query time, or they can be created as columns that will be created during processing and stored as part of the model. In this section we will go through how to create calculations of different kinds when working with tabular models.

Adding calculated columns to the tabular model

The simplest calculation that you can create is a calculated column. A calculated column could either reference columns in the same table or other columns in other tables. To create a simple calculated column, perform the following steps:

  1. Switch to the Grid view by clicking on the button in the lower right-hand corner in the tabular model designer.

  2. Click on the FactInternetSales table.

  3. Scroll to the right-hand side of the table and click on the top cell in the column under Add Column, as shown in the following...