Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® Analysis Services 2008 with MDX

12.3. Summary

In this chapter you worked with simple examples that demonstrated dimension writeback and cell writeback. You learned how to enable a dimension for writeback and then how to add, edit, and delete members of that dimension. You learned how those dimension writeback operations result in changes directly to the relational table that is behind the dimension.

You learned how to update a cube's cell data using the cell writeback feature of Analysis Services 2008. You also learned that the changes are propagated back to the cube only when you issue a commit statement. Therefore, you can perform many what-if scenarios by doing allocations followed by queries and discover the influence of potential allocations on the financial status of the company. Typically we expect calculations to be defined in MDX scripts that make use of the measure values such as budget, which will reflect the overall profit or key performance indicators of the company. If the updates you have done do not yield the expected results, you can roll back the incomplete transaction thereby preventing the entire update operation to be propagated to the writeback table. You also learned to be cautious of data explosion in cell writeback and about the new performance enhancements for cell writeback in Analysis Services 2008.

So far in this book you have learned to design dimensions and cubes, extend MDX using stored procedures, and finally to writeback data in dimensions and cubes. These abilities are all ...