Is there a proper way to use a snowflake design?

Hello,

I am trying to develop a cube that includes employee counts. Looking at Ralph Kimball's article about Human Resource data
http://www.dbmsmag.com/9802d05.html it looks like I should have an Employee Transaction Dimension table of all the employees and all their actions over time. I also should have a fact table which "is a snapshot that contains monthly numeric summaries that are difficult to calculate from the underlying transactions." That all works for me.

My question is, what is the next step with this? Specifically, I need to have dimensions on the Employee Transaction Dimension table such as their Department, Location, Rating, Gender, etc. Do I have those dimensions (Department, Location, Ratings, etc.) as a dimension on the Employee Dimension table or do I put them directly on the Fact table?

Also, will Analysis Services be able to deal with that? Meaning will I still be able to browse the cube correctly?

Thanks for the help.

-Gumbatman

Hi Gumbatman,

It will be hard to give you details answer of this question. You need to go over data model books.

Quick answer is as you might know in fact table you keep only numeric measures and key fields to your dimensions.

Looks you need dimensions employee, department, location, ratings, gender and keep transactions in fact table.

-Ashok

sql

Is there a perfmon counter(s) that show the results is from cubes?

How do I find out if the result is from the cube(s) with perfmon?
which result?
you have some performance monitor to know how many queries are executed, how
many are retrieve from the cache and many other counters.
"Vui" <Vui@.discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:1A377393-9E43-4AD7-9C5C-2018D86921FE@.microsoft.com...
> How do I find out if the result is from the cube(s) with perfmon?
>

Is there a perfmon counter(s) that show the results is from cubes?

How do I find out if the result is from the cube(s) with perfmon?which result?
you have some performance monitor to know how many queries are executed, how
many are retrieve from the cache and many other counters.
"Vui" <Vui@.discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:1A377393-9E43-4AD7-9C5C-2018D86921FE@.microsoft.com...
> How do I find out if the result is from the cube(s) with perfmon?
>

Is possible to create dynamic reports based on cubes?

Hi,

I would like to know if is possible to create dynamic reports based on cubes. What i mean is,after creating a cube with a couple of dimensions and measure if is there any way to give the normal users on the report manager or report builder the freedom to choose their own dimensions/measure so they can output the report with the choosen criteria.

Thanks.

I thought you could do that with report builder, but I never use that feature anyway... One thing you can do is have users connect to the cube via Excel. In excel 2003, go to Data->Import External Data->New Database Query. Then, they can drag and drop cube dimensions and measures into an excel style pivot table. It is very easy to use. I've heard the excel 2007 version has more features so you may look at that. -Joe
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It's almost imposible to achieve it directly in SSRS. I would recommend Proclarity, Excel 2007, Excel 2003 or other 3rd party products (Business Objects Voyager). Report Builder may be used as well, just the result is always limited to the chosen layout, parameters - simply the report content cannot be changed.

J.

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I have done my question before it was given me permissions for a connection to generate model in report manager and after sort out that issue and opening report builder i could open the data source related with cube. But now i have other situation that i need to confirm: Why the hierarchies created on the cubes and many of the attributes arent present on the model?Is any workaround that can be done?

In the meantime i tried to connect to the cube from the excel(the version installed is 2002) and i dont have the information about the data source on the OLAP Cube option even if i tried to create a new server and connect to the server. Any idea?

Thanks.