Saturday, February 25, 2012

Cube Design

Can two or more sets of 'non- related' tables be combine and form a cube? Currently I have only a query from the business domain and a cube was designed base on the query. If there are more unrelated queries coming up, should I add on to the same data source view or just add new data source view and new cube? Which is recommended?

Can I say one report model template (adhoc reporting) can only consist of one cube or possible to have many cubes?

Regards

Goh

Hello. By 'non-related tables' you mean that the result set of the queries do not share keys over their different source systems? Do the columns have the same type of information?

The standard solution for this is to build a data warehouse to create one version of the "truth" in the business. You do not load "information silos" or fragmented information into the same cube. In the data warehouse you can also keep history of changes in the source systems and be able trace what have happened.

If you, for some reason, cannot build a DW your best approach is to build separate cubes and separate dimensions for each query/source.

You can build a view and use TSQL UNION to build a general view of each source and create one cube on top of that. The problem with this approach is that in sales you must be sure that there are no internal transactions between each source. If so, your sales data will overestimate sales.

My recommendation is to build a DW and solve the problem with non-related tables there.

HTH

Thomas Ivarsson

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