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

Where to perform currency conversion


In the next section, we will see how to use the "Add Business Intelligence Wizard" in BI Development Studio to implement currency conversion. This wizard can be useful when we decide to implement currency conversion inside the Analysis Services cube itself. However, this is not always the best choice, as we are going to explain in this section.

Generally speaking, it's always better to perform any currency conversion during the ETL phase. However, this is usually only feasible when data will only ever be displayed in one reference currency—in other words, when the end user is not able to modify the currency to be used to display aggregated data. This does not mean we do not need to have a currency dimension in our cube, because it could be useful to know the original currency of the transactions. It only means that aggregated data will always be displayed in the same currency, regardless of any selection made on any dimension.

For example, end users could...