Create more than 1 measure from single table column - ssas

I am a newbie to SSAS OLAP Cube. I need to create 3 measures from a single table column. Here is the table,
So, I have created 3 tables using Named query in Datasource View. But, it restricts to create 3 measure group for 3 measures. Is there any easy way to do this.

Without knowing how much access you have to create views on the database from which this cube is being created there are a couple of ways to do this.
Option 1 - In the Database
It is good practice to put a view over the tables that you want to build your cube against and point the cube to these views instead of the underlying database tables. If you create a view over this table you can create three columns in your view against the column you have specified above. In your data source view you will then use the view in the database instead of the table and as this view has all three columns they will be available to you to place in one measure group.
This would mean that your view will need to do the WHERE clause filtering and pivoting of the data.
Option 2 - In the Data Source View
If you cannot create a view in the database then you can create all three columns in one named query and thus have one object in the data source view that contains all three columns. This will then allow you to use those columns as measures in the same way that the view in Option 1 would have allowed.
Option 3 - Calculated Measures from three DSV objects
You could keep your solution exactly as it currently is and have three measure groups, each with one measure in them. You then set each of these measure to be Hidden, which will hide the measure groups from users. You then create three calculated measure in SSAS each pointing to one of these measure and set the display folder of all three calculated measures to be the same. When a user then connects to your cube they will see only the calculated measures and they will all appear in the same folder giving the appearance of being in the same measure group.
Option 4 - Calculated Measures using Dimension Filtering
If the value you are filtering on in your where clause in the DSV is brought into the cube in a dimension then you could instead create only one measure from the named query you have created. You can then create three calculated measures and in the MDX of each you will refer to the measure in your measure group and filter based on the Dimension attribute and its member values. You can then place these calculated measures in your measure group and set the original measure to be Hidden.
Option 5 - Filter by the dimension attribute
If you have a dimension with TxType in it you could set the Aggregation function of the measure to Count and then simply drag the TxType attribute from the dimension where it is located onto your reports to filter the measure according to its members.
I hope that helps.

Related

Creating an OLAP Cube from a flat table in SSAS/SSRS

I'm new to that topic. I've got a database with a flat fact table, which contain data like date, product group, product subgroup, product actual name, and some calculations/statistics. All I need to do is create a report using olap cube. I have got two ideas how to create that, but dont know which draft is better (if even correct). The original DAILY_REPORT... table has not a primary key. Its just a data table. In first concept I have created every table (which will be as a dimension) with a ID, and connected the product->family of product->project->building in a hierarchy. Another concept is without all ID's and hierarchy. Relation created automatically based on names. Can somebody explain me in which direction I should tend...?
First idea:
http://imgur.com/iKNfAXF
Second:
http://imgur.com/IZjW1W6
Thanks in advance!
You can follow these steps to create your cube:
Create a separate view for each of the dimensions you want to have. Group similar type of data in one view, for e.g. Product Name, Product Group, Product Sub-Group, etc.
Keep the data in your dimension view as DISTINCT data. for e.g. SELECT DISTINCT [Product Name], [Product Group], [Product Sub-Group] FROM TABLE
Keep an 'ID' column in each dimension view, for e.g. Product ID in Product view
Create a view for your fact. Include 'ID' column of each dimension in your Fact view. This will help you to create relationship on 'ID' column, which will be a lot faster than relationship created on top of names.
For creating hierarchies in dimension attributes, SSAS provide drag and drop functionality.
If you need more details let me know.
You could construct the dimensions you need by views that based on distinct queries (i.e. SELECT DISTINCT) from the source data. These can be used to populate the dimensions.
You can make a synthetic date dimension fairly easily.
Then you can create a DSV that joins the views back against the fact table to populate the measure group.
If you need to fake a primary key then you can use a view that annotates the fact table with a column generated from row_number() or some similar means. Note that this is not necessarily stable across runs, so you can't rely on it for incremental loads. However, it would work fine for complete refreshes.

SSAS 3 fact tables, but only 2 relate to a certain dimension

I have a cube with 3 fact tables and 20 + dimensions that relate easily to all 3 fact tables and everything works fine except for the fact that one of the dimensions (Warehouse) is only related to 2 of the 3 fact tables. My problem I guess is a display issue. When the user is viewing measures from all 3 fact tables then drags over the Warehouse dimension, it simply repeats the grand total of the measure in the 3rd fact table for every possible value of Warehouse. This certainly makes sense to me as there is no relationship set up and it's conceptually behaving almost like a cross-join. Nonetheless, it's confusing to users and I'd like to not have the grand total duplicated for each dimension member in Warehouse. I was thinking one solution was to create a dummy warehouse called "Not Applicable" and then relate every row in the 3rd fact table to that dimension member. I was hoping there's just a setting in SSAS where I could control this behavior so I didn't have to create any new warehouse values. Is there a standard way to handle non-related dimensions with multiple fact tables? Thanks in advance.
You can use the "IgnoreUnrelatedDimensions" property of the measure group not related to Warehouse: set it from the default value true to false. Then, measure values for this measure group will only be shown for the "All" members from the warehouse dimension, and the cells will be null (empty) for non-All members of this dimension.
This is a global setting per measure group, you cannot configure it individually per dimension and measure group. But for your purpose, this should be fine.

dimension hierarchy in SSAS (multiple relationships?)

I have a fact table with columns Product Model and measure Installed base(not important, any other measure would do the same).
Than I have dimension table, and here comes the tricky part:
I have many product models, and each belong to higher level custom_groups (4 in total),
Same product model may belong to more than one custom groupX, and custom groupX may belong to more than one custom groups X-1.
for example hierarchy from highest CG1 to lowest PM Level:
XXX=>YYY=>ZZZ=>WWW
LLL=>MMM=>QQQ=>WWW
RRR=>PPP=>QQQ=>TTT
you can see, that last level PM WWW belongs to 2 different custom groups 3 (QQQ and ZZZ) whereas custom group 3 QQQ may belong to two different custom groups 2 (MMM and PPP in this case).
I tried to model this via hierarchies in SSAS but either I got wrong measure results (IB is summed up without aggregations and results are same for all custom groups), or I get missing some custom groups in my hierarchy.
You can solve this using a many-to-many relationship: Create a dimension table with four columns for the four custom group levels, as well as a custom_group_id column. Fill in to this table all combinations of custom groups that appear in your data. Then build a bridge table (aka factless fact table) with the two columns product_model and custom_group_id. Fill a record into this for each group combination that a product belongs to.
Then, in BIDS create a dimension from the custom group table, and a measure group from your bridge table, using count as the only measure, and make this measure invisible. Finally in the "Dimension Usage" tab of Cube Editor, configure the relationship between the main measure group and the custom group dimension to be many-to-many via the bridge measure group.

can´t make referenced relationship to work

I have three tables, one fact and two dimensions. I want to make a referenced relationship between the fact table(measures) called InternetSales and the Geography table, se image(schemaCubeStructure".
The intermediate table is Customer. I first create the Geography and InternetSales tables and then the Customer with a field from Geography to use later when creating the ref. rel.
Everything works fine until browsing the data in the cube (se image "errorBrowseSalesCube". If i don´t make the relationship between the two tables i get image "correctBrowseSalesCube" which is what i want. That is i don´t get any data when processing with the rel.ref.
See image "dimensionUsageSalesCube for rel.ref.
Why is that i don´t get any data?
correctBrowseSalesCube
errorBrowseSalesCube
dimensionUsageSalesCube
schemaCubeStructure
What fields did you use when setting up your reference dimension relationship between Georgaphy and Internet Sales?
The in the AdventureWorksDW database, the Georgaphy dimension is a snowflake off of Customer dimension. In the AdvWrks cube project, Microsoft includes the geography table and corresponding attributes in the customer ssas dimension (red boxes in screenshot below). However, they could have, as it looks like you are trying to do, simply added the GeographyKey to the customer dimension (red arrow in screenshot below)
This exposes the GeorgaphyKey field when creating the reference dimension relationship so that you can properly define the relationship between the intermediate dimension (customer) and the reference dimension (geography):
After that, you can properly browse the Internet Sales facts by Georgraphy dimension attribute (and user) hierarchies:
The correctBrowse sales cube can be easily explained. It means that the data is not calculated based on the Geography dimension and thus indicates that the connection between the Internet sales and the Geography is not correctly calculated.
I would suggest the following:
Try making the customer a Mesaure (or fact table). Do not rename it just make a measure i.e. the count of customers (can be used as a counter of customers/per region or can be invisible altogether).
Then The customer will appear as a measure in Dimension usage and then connect Geography to Internet sales via a many to many relation Using the customer measure table.

Using "Fact" Relationship Type on the "Dimension Usage" tab in a SSAS OLAP cube

I was hoping someone could explain the appropriate use of the 'FACT Relationship Type' under the Dimension Usage tab. Is it simply to create a dimension out of your fact table to access attribute on the fact table itself?
Thanks in advance!
Yes, if your fact table has attributes that you would like to slice by (create a dimension from), you would use this relationship type.
Functionally, to the users it behaves no differently than a regular relationship.
After you create your dimensions and cubes you need to define how each dimension is related to each measure group. A measure group is a set of measures exposed by a single fact table.
Each cube can contain multiple fact tables and multiple dimensions. However, not every dimension will be related to every fact table.
To define relationships right click the cube in BIDS and choose open; then navigate to the Dimension Usage tab. If you click the ellipsis button next to each dimension you will see a screen that allows you to change dimension usage for a particular measure group. You can choose from the following options:
Regular default option; the dimension is joined directly to the fact table
No relationship the dimension is not related to the current measure group
Fact the dimension and fact are derived from a single table. If this is the case your dimensional warehouse has poor design and isn't likely to perform well. Consider separating fact and dimension tables.
Referenced the dimension is joined to an intermediate table prior to being joined to the fact table. Referenced relationship resembles a snowflake dimension, but is slightly different. Suppose you have a customer dimension and a sales fact; you'd like to examine total sales by customer, but you also want to examine line item sales by customer. Instead of duplicating the customer key in the line item fact table you can treat the sales fact as an intermediate table to join customer to line item.
Many-to-many this option involves two fact tables and two dimension tables. Dimension A is joined to an intermediate fact A, which in turn joins to dimension B to which the fact B is joined. Much like with fact option if you need to use many-to-many option your design could probably use some improvement. This type of relationship is sometimes necessary if you are building cubes on top of a relational database that is in 3rd normal form. It is strongly advisable to use a dimensional model with star schema for all cubes. For example you could have two fact tables: vehicles and options; each vehicle can come with a number of options. You're likely to examine vehicle sales by customer, and options by the items that are included in each option. Therefore you would have a customer dimension and item dimension. You could also want to examine vehicles sales by included item. If so the vehicle fact would be joined to the options fact and customer dimension; the options fact would also join to items' dimension.
Data mining target dimension is based on a mining model which is built from a source dimension. Both source dimension and target dimension must be included in the cube.