Building Cubes and Administering Cubes

Defining Dimensions and Levels

Within the Cube Designer wizard, you can specify dimensions and levels for a cube on the Dimension Designer wizard. This wizard enables you to select the type of dimension you are creating and then select the levels for that dimension.

Defining Dimensions

The Dimension Designer wizard enables you to add new dimensions to a cube and edit existing dimensions. On the Dimension Designer - General page, you can specify the following information for a dimension:

the type of dimension you are creating (Standard, TIME, or GEO)
the sort order for level values in that dimension
whether to allow new members for the dimension during an incremental update of the cube
star schema mapping details. such as the dimension table, key, and fact key
missing values for ragged or unbalanced data

Defining Levels for a Dimension

After you specify the general information for a dimension, you can select the levels for that dimension. On the Dimension Designer - Level page, select the Add button. The Add Levels dialog box opens. From here you can select the input columns for the levels that you are adding to the dimension. You can have a maximum of 256 levels per cube.

If you have defined a dimension as a TIME type dimension, the Add button is changed to a drop-down list of options. A second option for adding levels to the dimension is then available. You can select either of the following options:

Add levels
Add supplied time hierarchies

Note: See Specifying the Time Dimension for more details. [cautionend]

After you have selected the levels for a dimension, you can select the attributes for each level on the Dimension Designer - Level page. You can specify the following information for a level:

format
caption
sort order
missing member string
description

You can also add more levels to the dimension, duplicate a level, or delete a level.

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