Professional SQL Server™ Analysis Services 2005 with MDX

5.10. Summary

At the beginning of each episode of the television serial "The Twilight Zone" the viewer was exhorted to not adjust their television set. With all due respect to Rod Serling, just the opposite is true with Analysis Services 2005. Yes, you will get great results from using the Dimension Wizard and other wizards in BIDS, but for optimal results, you will want to fine-tune what those wizards produce. A great example is using the Properties window to assign descriptive names to an attribute which might otherwise harbor some obscure name coming from a source database. More profoundly, you can use the Dimension Designer to create translations for the attributes and hierarchies of a dimension into another language.

In addition to learning about dimensions, you learned the necessity of deploying your dimension to the instance of Analysis Services where the dimension is processed by retrieving the data from the data source. Processing is essential to enable the user to browse a dimension. The communication between BIDS and an instance of Analysis Services is accomplished through a SOAP-based XML API called XML/A (XML for Analysis), which is an industry standard. Even more interesting is that dimensions stored in Analysis Services are represented internally as cubes — one-dimensional cubes; and what a coincidence, because cubes are the topic of Chapter 6.