Creating Perspectives

Analysis Services 2005 provides you with the option of creating a cube that combines many fact tables. Each cube dimension can contain several attributes and hierarchies. Even though the cube might contain all the relevant data for business analysis combined into a single object, the users of the cube might only be interested in sections of the cube. For example you can have a cube that contains sales and budgeting information of a company. The Sales department is only interested in viewing sales-relevant data, whereas the users involved in budgeting or forecasting next year's revenue are only interested in budget-relevant sections of the cube. Typically, users do not like to see too much extra information. In order to accommodate this, Analysis Services 2005 provides you with the option of creating a view of a cube that only contains a subset of objects within the cube, called a perspective.

In the Adventure Works DW cube you have created you have two fact tables, FactInternetSales and FactResellerSales. To understand the behavior of perspectives, create a perspective for Internet Sales and a perspective for Reseller Sales. The cube itself is the default perspective. The following steps show you how to create new perspectives:

1. Click the Perspective tab in the Cube Designer. You will see a column on the left showing the measures, dimensions, and calculated members as shown in Figure 6-30.

   
   Figure 6-30

2. Right-click in the window pane and select New Perspective as shown in Figure 6-30. You can also create a new perspective by clicking the icon in the toolbar. A new column with the name Perspective is created. You have a checkbox next to each object in the cube and these are selected by default. Rename the perspective Internet Sales. Deselect the Fact Reseller Sales measure group and the dimensions Dim Employee and Dim Reseller.

3. Create another perspective called Reseller Sales. Deselect the Fact Internet Sales measure group and Dim Customer.

Your Perspective window will now look similar to Figure 6-31. Now deploy the project. The BIDS sends the definitions for the new perspectives to the server. Perspectives are not new cubes on the server, but only a view of the main cube object. Keep in mind that these are represented as different cubes with the cube names represented as the perspective name when a client queries for the cube in a database.

Figure 6-31

In Chapter 5 you learned to specify translations to attributes in a dimension. Similarly, you can create translations for the cube. You see the effect of perspectives along with translations after learning how to create translations for a cube.