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

Named sets


Another very interesting topic, slightly related to calculated members, is that of named sets. A named set is, simply, a set of members or tuples to which we assign a name. We define named sets to make it easier for users to build their queries, and also to help us as developers to write more readable code.

Regular named sets

Let's take a look at an example of how named sets can be used. Our user might want to build an Excel report that shows detailed information about the sales of the current month, the sales of the previous month, and the total sales of the last three years. Without a named set, at each start of the month the user would need to update the dates selected in the report in order to display the most recent month with data. In order to avoid having to do this, we can define a named set containing exactly the date range the user wants to see in the report that will never need manual updating. Here's how to do this.

First of all, since the Date Order dimension contains...