As noted in Part 1, OLAP presents Business Intelligence via what is known as a CUBE. A Cube has many dimensions and it provides a faster method to access the intelligence compared to the structured querying where the overhead of 'Joins' makes it inefficient. Taking the example of a 'Sales' Cube having everything related to sales we can identify the dimensions as the Sales Outlet, The Customers , the Products and the time period over which sales are being audited or looked into. We also notice that there are certain measures that we are interested related to these 'dimensions' like 'Store Sales', 'Cost of Products, 'number of units sold' etc. The Analysis Services analyzes these intricate relationship that exist in a cube. In this part we will see the process of creating a Cube in VS 2008.

Reviewing Jayaram's other OLAP related articles may greatly help in understanding this article.

Creating a New Cube

The folder structure for the project developed in Part 1 is shown in the next figure. The Northwind.ds data source and the Northwind.dsv data source view were configured in Part 1. There are no pre-existing cubes in Nwind2008.

Right click the Cubes folder and from the drop-down menu you can create a new Cube.

Click on New Cube... menu item. This opens the Cube Wizard welcome window as shown.

Click on the Next button. This opens the Select Creation Method page of the wizard as shown. There are three options and the default is used for this article.

Click on the Next button. This opens the Select Measure Groups tables. At least one table must be chosen to continue. There is even the option of asking for a suggestion.

Click on the Suggest button at the top. The program goes through the motions and comes up with two tables as candidates for Measures group, the Products table and the Order Details table. You will see check marks appearing for these two tables. Accept the suggested tables for measures and click on the Next button.

This opens the Select Measures window where you can choose measures that you want to include in the Cube as shown.

Uncheck the ID related items in the Products table and click on the Next button. This brings up the Select New Dimensions window as shown in the next figure. Here also one could choose the needed items. For this article the default is accepted.

Click on the Next button. This takes you to the Completing the Wizard window which shows your Cube contents in a tree view as shown.

Now click on the Finish button. This creates the Cube as shown in the Solution Explorer.

Now you will see additional tabs open up for the Northwind.cube as shown. Using these tabs you can look at more details. These are outside the scope of this article.

Also separate windows gets displayed for Cube's Measures and Dimensions as shown.

Also, the Data Source View of the Cube with the relationships between the Dimensions and Measures gets displayed as shown.