Case Study of Building a Data Warehouse with Analysis Services (Part Two)

• By Baya Dewald
• Feb 17, 2006

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Data Warehouse Project Management

The first article in this series introduced you to steps involved in building a data warehouse. It also presented an example scenario of solving business problems with a data warehouse. This article continues exploring challenges involved in building and maintaining a warehousing solution.

Analysis Services Cubes

So far we have dimension and fact tables in the warehouse. Now we can create dimensions and cubes within MS Analysis Services. Plenty of tutorials and articles exist, showing you step-by-step wizards that Analysis Services supplies for creating dimensions and cubes, so I won’t repeat them here. Instead, Figure 1 shows you the final view of the data within Analysis Manager.

Figure 1 View of the cube data within Analysis Manager.

If we had a data source that was continuously updated by Northwind employees, we would also have to reprocess the cube to make sure it had up-to-date data. You can process cubes manually through Analysis Manager or use Analysis Services Processing Task within DTS.