Summary

Ok, Neo, crawl up out of the rabbit hole; you have reached the conclusion of this chapter. And what a profound trip that was! This chapter has provided you with amazing new tools for your BI repertoire. In fact, consider yourself admitted to the knowledgeable inner-circle of BI professionals because you know that you can add measure groups from any accessible cube to your own cube without the use of views in SQL Server. This is functionally equivalent to the virtual cube scenario in Analysis Services 2000 without the extra steps associated with creation and maintenance of all those sub-cubes. This one change encapsulates a lot of power, and you are going to have fun discovering that power. Similarly, with remote partitions there is that compelling scalability factor that kicks in; it's great! The Cube Wizard also provides you the ability to create Cubes without a data source through templates similar to the Dimension Wizard which was not discussed in this chapter. The Cube Wizard has two templates to choose from. Once the Cube has been created you would need to populate the tables with appropriate data before processing the cube. We leave it to you to explore this option from the Cube Wizard by selecting the build method "build a cube without a data source."

Much of this chapter was dedicated to cube enhancements, which fall directly to the bottom line of providing business information; using actions and KPIs both will enhance any digital dashboard you might create. In fact, when you start building custom front ends for consumption of your business intelligence applications, like digital dashboards which reflect current business operations, there are cases where you will have to write your own application for filtering based on real-time data. Indeed, some complex and custom operations cannot even be defined in a cube. For such operations, Analysis Services provides support for the writing of custom code in ActiveX components or in managed code. There is more on the programmatic approach in the next chapter.