ROLAP, one of the supported variations of OLAP technology, is a type of OLAP in which multidimensional data is stored in a relational database such as a SAS table or an ORACLE table. Currently, dimensions for an individual ROLAP cube cannot be incrementally updated. If any new members are added to the underlying ROLAP tables, then a full rebuild of the OLAP cube must be performed in order to correctly update the dimension member metadata.

Starting in SAS^® 9.3, shared dimensions are available for SAS OLAP cubes. A shared dimension provides a common dimension that is created and updated in one location and is automatically reflected across all cubes that use the dimension.

Unlike individual cube dimensions, SAS shared dimensions can be incrementally updated, even for ROLAP cubes. Therefore, if you want to perform an incremental update to reduce build time for your ROLAP cube, you can define that dimension as a shared dimension.

For more information about shared dimensions, see Building a Shared Dimension.

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