Professional SQL Server™ Analysis Services 2005 with MDX

8.6. Dimension Writeback

Dimension writeback is another enhancement to dimensions and is available through the Dimension Intelligence Wizard. This is an important feature that allows you to create or modify members in your dimension without having to go to your relational data source. Once you enable your dimension for writeback, Analysis Services provides you the functionality to add or modify members through the Dimension Browser pane. Some business scenarios where dimension writeback can be used are:

• When employees of an organization move from one location to another and their reporting structure in the organization and attributes of employee such as address and phone number change.

• When an employee's status changes due to marriage or childbirth and these changes need to be updated in the dimension.

• When you have an Account dimension and new types of accounts are being introduced and you need to add members to the dimension.

When you writeback data to the dimension, Analysis Services propagates the change in the data to the relational data source and does an incremental process of the dimension, so that affected members are processed. During this time the dimension and cube will be available for querying for other users. The following steps show how to enable writeback on the Employee dimension and will help you understand the dimension writeback behavior by performing writeback operations on certain employees:

1. Open the Employee dimension in the dimension editor.

2. Click the icon ...