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Part IX: Business Intelligence
By default, the name of the (All) level will be All, which is quite practical and suffi cient
for most applications. Use the AttributeAllMemberName or the user hierarchy property
AllMemberName to customize the All level name. Regardless of name, the (All) member
is also the default member. You can change the default member by setting the dimension’s
DefaultMember property.You can often set default members when data included in a cube is not commonly queried.
Consider a cube populated with sales transactions that are mostly successful but sometimes
fail due to customer credit or other problems. Nearly everyone that queries the cube will be
interested in the volume and amount of successful transactions. Only someone doing failure
analysis will want to view other than successful transactions.Another option is to eliminate the (All) level entirely by setting an attribute’s
IsAggregatable property to false. When the (All) level is eliminated, either a
DefaultMember must be specifi ed or one will be chosen at random at query time. In addi-
tion, the attribute can participate in user hierarchies only at the top level because appear-
ing in a lower level would require the attribute to be aggregated.Grouping Dimension Members
The creation of member groups, or discretization, is the process to group the values of a
many-valued attribute into discrete “buckets” of data. This is a useful approach for repre-
senting a large number of continuous values, such as annual income or commute distance.
Enable the feature on an attribute by setting the DiscretizationBucketCount property
to the number of groups to be created and by choosing a DiscretizationMethod from
the list. Automatic results in reasonable groupings for most applications. Changes to the
underlying data may cause new groupings to be calculated during cube processing.Cubes
A cube brings the elements of the design process together and exposes them to the user,
combining data sources, data source views, dimensions, measures, and calculations in a
single container. A cube can contain data (measures) from many fact tables organized into
measure groups.Using the Cube Wizard has been covered in earlier sections, both from the top-down
approach (see “Analysis Services Quick Start”) and from the bottom-up approach (see
“Creating a Cube”). After you create the cube structure, you can refi ne it using the Cube
Designer.Open any cube from the Solution Explorer to use the Cube Designer, as shown in Figure
53-8. The Cube Designer presents information in several tabbed views described in the
remainder of this section.c53.indd 1210c53.indd 1210 7/31/2012 10:30:24 AM7/31/2012 10:30:24 AM
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