Book Image

Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services

Book Image

Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services

Overview of this book

Microsoft's SQL Server Analysis Services 2008 is an OLAP server that allows users to analyze business data quickly and easily. However, designing cubes in Analysis Services can be a complex task: it's all too easy to make mistakes early on in development that lead to serious problems when the cube is in production. Learning the best practices for cube design before you start your project will help you avoid these problems and ensure that your project is a success. This book offers practical advice on how to go about designing and building fast, scalable, and maintainable cubes that will meet your users' requirements and help make your Business Intelligence project a success. This book gives readers insight into the best practices for designing and building Microsoft Analysis Services 2008 cubes. It also provides details about server architecture, performance tuning, security, and administration of an Analysis Services solution. In this book, you will learn how to design and implement Analysis Services cubes. Starting from designing a data mart for Analysis Services, through the creation of dimensions and measure groups, to putting the cube into production, we'll explore the whole of the development lifecycle. This book is an invaluable guide for anyone who is planning to use Microsoft Analysis Services 2008 in a Business Intelligence project.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Expert Cube Development with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Common calculations


We are now going to show some very common types of calculated member. As stated before, the goal here is not to spend a lot of time explaining how the MDX code actually works, but to show some examples of calculations that can be copied and adapted easily for almost any cube.

Simple calculations

The simplest kind of calculated members are those that perform basic arithmetic on other measures. For example, we might have two real measures in the cube that represent our sales and our costs; to calculate our profit we just need to subtract costs from sales.

To add a calculation like this to the cube all we need to do is open the Cube Editor in BI Development Studio, go to the Calculations tab, and once we're there we have a choice of two ways to create a calculated measure. By default the Calculations tab opens in Form View, and to create a calculated member here we simply need to click on the New Calculated Member button and fill in all of the properties as required; behind...