CHAPTER 12 DELIVERING BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE WITH SSRS
analyzed not just two-dimensionally like rows and columns of a T-SQL query, but also by being drilled
into and sliced at many dimensions.
Picture a cube like the Rubik’s cube invented in 1974 that many of us played with as children. It
contains three squares in height, three squares in width and three squares on depth. With that picture in
your head, imagine if you will that the green side of the Rubik’s cube represents the Date of Admission
dimension, the red side representing the Branch dimension and the yellow representing the Time to
Admission measure. Much easier than solving a Rubik’s cube, you could create an MDX query that
would return the intersection of these three points as shown in Figure 12-4.
The dimensions you will use in the Patient Referral cube are:- County
- Referral Source
- Diagnosis
- Payer
- Branch
- Date of Admission
Since the starting point in this exercise is a prepopulated and processed cube, it is important to
make sure you are getting the desired data from the cube before creating your SSRS reports. With the
Pro_SSRS project open in BIDS, navigate to the Patient Referral SSAS project in the Solution Explorer,
expand to Cubes, and double-click Patient Referral.cube. This will open the cube in design mode. Once
the cube is open, select the Browser tab. Figure 12-2 shows the opened cube with the combined
measures and dimensions ready to be dragged and dropped into the query pane. If no data appears in
the Browser tab, and a message indicates that there is a permission problem or the database does not
exist, this usually indicates that the cube needs to be processed or the SSAS Patient Referral database
needs to be deployed. To deploy the Patient Referral OLAP database (the cube) in BIDS, right-click the
Patient Referral project, and select Deploy. If the default permission settings are insufficient for your
Analysis Services instance, you may have to open up the Data Source Designer for the HW Analysis data
source and change the Impersonation Information to use a specific user name and password. For
instance, my settings are set to use “SQLBIGEEK\bmcdonald” for the Windows user with appropriate
permissions to deploy the cube. Once you have deployed the Patient Referral OLAP database
successfully, you can return to the Browser tab, and click the available link to reconnect to the database.