Chapter 4. Working with Data Sources and Data Source Views
You have completed the first three chapters of the book where you learned the concepts of data warehousing, worked hands on with Analysis Services tools and finally learned the basics of the MDX language to retrieve data from Analysis Services. The next three chapters of the book guide you to use the product to design your cubes and dimensions. The traditional approach of designing your cubes and dimensions is based upon an existing single-source data set. You will be working with multiple relational data sources in the real world when you develop business intelligence applications. In this chapter you learn what data sources are and how they feed into the creation of Data Source Views (DSVs). These DSVs provide you a consolidated view on just the tables and joins on tables of interest across the one or more data sources you defined. The data source and DSVs literally form the foundation for subsequent construction of both dimensions and cubes. Note that more than one data source per project is supported as are multiple DSVs per project; you learn how this infrastructure plays out in this chapter.
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