Summary

You have experienced more chapter flashbacks than usual here, but that merely suggests certain loose ends are getting tied together and certain mental connections are being reinforced. In this chapter you learned about custom rollups using the common business concept of depreciation, which addresses the nature of value change over time. Any type of change over time is a recurrent theme in business intelligence, and this chapter discussed use of the Time Intelligence enhancement, which can be used on cubes with a Time dimension to provide views by time period. Similarly, the Account Intelligence enhancement was explored; it maps known business entities like Income, Expense, Asset, and Liability to the dimensions in your cube so that appropriate rollup can be done for accounts natively in Analysis Services.

The Account Intelligence enhancement also allows you to add additional accounts and change aggregation functions for specific accounts based on your business requirements. The Server Time dimension helps you to define range-based time dimension quickly when there is no time table in your data source. The Dimension Wizard also provides you the ability to create the standard dimension types such as Customers, Organizations, Time, Currency, etc., along with appropriate attributes and hierarchies and generate appropriate schemas in your data source which is not discussed in this chapter. You would need to populate these tables with appropriate data before processing the dimensions. We leave it you to explore this option from the Dimension Wizard by selecting the build method "build the dimension without a data source." Finally, dimension writeback was discussed and you learned how data can be written to a relational table, and an incremental process is kicked off so that related members in the dimension are processed along with the corresponding cube. Speaking of cubes, that is what the next chapter is about. Now that you have learned about dimension enhancement, it is time to move on to advanced cube design!