In this chapter, we discussed how to deal with some common problems we might face when designing our Analysis Services dimensions: grouping and banding members and numeric values; slowly changing dimensions; junk dimensions; ragged hierarchies; and parent/child hierarchies. We found that we can create new attributes on a dimension to group members and create bandings for numeric values using some simple SQL. This can have a positive impact on the user's experience. We also found that with a bit of thought, the three different types of SCDs can all be modeled satisfactorily. With ragged hierarchies, we learned that the parent/child hierarchies are very flexible, but have several problems, especially with query performance, and should be avoided where possible. We also saw that using a regular user hierarchy and the HideMemberIf property is a better option, although not without its own limitations.

In the next chapter, we will stay on the topic of modeling and look at how common business...