Modifying and Maintaining Cubes

Multiple Language Support and Dimension Table Translations

OLAP cube data is often generated in one language but needed in other languages. For example, a company's OLAP cube data might be stored in English, but users who speak Spanish and Turkish need access to it. So, the member values as well as the captions that are assigned to dimensions, hierarchies, levels, and so on need to be translated. Multiple language support is available only for cubes that are loaded from star schemas. It is used to read your alternate locale data sets and create locale-specific metadata for use at query time. Query results are returned in the language of the requested locale.

You can specify language support when building a cube either in the Cube Designer wizard or with PROC OLAP code. There are 56 possible language locales, and English is the default language.

SAS OLAP Cube Studio and Dimension Table Translations

In the Cube Designer - General page, select the Advanced button. If you selected Star Schema as the input type in the Cube Designer - General window, you will see the Dimension Table Translations tab. From the Available list, select the needed languages for the translation tables and move it to the Selected list. The first language in the Selected list is the default language.

PROC OLAP and the USER_DEFINED_TRANSLATIONS Statement

The USER_DEFINED_TRANSLATIONS statement is used in conjunction with the DIMENSION statement options DIMTABLEMEMPREF= and DIMTABLELIBREF=. For more information, see the DIMENSION Statement.

SAS Servers and Character Encoding

If your server metadata contains characters other than those typically found in English, then you must be careful to start your server with an ENCODING= or LOCALE= system option that accommodates those characters. For example, a SAS server started with the default US English locale cannot read metadata that contains Japanese characters. SAS will fail to start and log a message indicating a transcoding failure.

In general, different SAS jobs or servers can run different encodings (such as ASCII/EBCDIC or various Asian DBCS encodings) as long as the encoding that is used by the particular job or server can represent all the characters of the data being processed. In the context of server start up, this requires that you review the characters used in the metadata describing your server (as indicated by the SERVER= object server parameter) to ensure that SAS runs under an encoding that supports those characters.

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