After building our first Cube it becomes clear that the wizard although useful in creating quite a lot of the mundane/repetitive configurations, is let face it a little too basic for our tastes. For example the dimensions were not fleshed out, I couldnt for example select a product name or customer name, only the ID values. Which lets face it is useless when presenting this to a manager. So what we need to do is create/alter our Dimensions.
What is a Dimension ?
Well, if you havent guessed already that Dimension objects are the areas where your text-based information such as product names, customers names etc are placed. Why call it a Dimension? Well the whole purpose of a cube is to identify aggregated values grouped by commonality such as year by customer, or region by product etc... The grouping "buckets" (not a reserved word but what I call them) are the placeholders to store these aggregated values. By using one or more of these they mark a form of co-ordinate to pick a specific value. E.g. I want to see total sales by year by product by region. That example uses 3 Dimension objects Date, Product & Region. If you are still not sure what I mean please watch the Business Intelligence 101 video prior to continuing on.
This video will tell you the basics of Dimension modelling but be warned, there is significant work to be done here it is not as clear cut as it first seems. If you want to be good at Cubes you need to be amazing at Dimension creation!
No comments:
Post a Comment