Tabs in the SSAS Cube Designer

Marla Sukesh

5.00/5 (2 votes)

29 Aug 2014CPOL2 min read

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Tabs in the SSAS cube designer

What We Will Learn?

While creating cube using SQL server data tools or Business intelligence development studio, we came across many tabs in the designer window.

Let’s understand each one of the tabs in short.

1. Cube Structure

Shows the current structure of the cube. Shows the available dimensions, Facts and relationships between them.
It lets us include new dimensions which are not part of the cube right now.
It lets us include new measures which are not part of the cube right now.

2. Dimension Usage

After we include new dimension or measure into the cube, it’s very important to connect dimensions and cubes. This tab lets us decide how dimensions are connected to cube.

3. Calculation

This tab lets us create new calculated members for the cube. Calculated members mean members whose values will be calculated from other members.

4. KPI

KPI or Key value indicators let us display custom icons based on the current value.
Note: Icon may or may not be supported in the client. Example when client is Excel, it shows perfectly fine but maybe some other cube client will not support it.

5. Actions

Let us perform custom actions when particular cell (value in the cell) in the cube output is clicked.
Note: Again, it depends on the client. She/he may or may not have support for this.

6. Partitions

Usually inside cube for storing fact table data partitions are created. By default, one partition will be created for one fact table. Those partitions can be seen in this tab. Sometimes, we create multiple partitions for a single fact table.
Example: One partition will store historical data whereas one will store current data.

Advantages of creating multiple partitions are:

Each partition can be pointing to different data source in short different physical location.
Each partition can be configured with different storage settings
Each partition can have different aggregations
Each partition can be processed independently and thus processing speed will be improved a lot.

7. Aggregation

Let us design the aggregation for the partitions.

Designing aggregation makes cube store aggregated values inside cube partition based on aggregation settings.

8. Perspectives

Perspective let us create different views for our cube. It’s not security. It’s just a view to make end users life easy. Every view will provide different information.
Example: Perspective created for product manager will show only dimensions and facts related to Product.