Creating an InfoCube

In BW, Customer ID, Material Number, Sales Representative ID, Unit of Measure, and Transaction Date are called characteristics. Customer Name and Customer Address are attributes of Customer ID, although they are characteristics as well. Per Unit Sales Price, Quantity Sold, and Sales Revenue are referred to as key figures. Characteristics and key figures are collectively termed InfoObjects.

A key figure can be an attribute of a characteristic. For instance, Per Unit Sales Price can be an attribute of Material Number. In our examples, Per Unit Sales Price is a fact table key figure. In the real world, such decisions are made during the data warehouse design phase. Chapter 7 provides some guidelines for making such decisions.

InfoObjects are analogous to bricks. We use these objects to build InfoCubes. An InfoCube comprises the fact table and its associated dimension tables in a star schema.

In this chapter, we will demonstrate how to create an InfoCube that implements the star schema from Figure 1.1. We start from creating an InfoArea. An InfoArea is analogous to a construction site, on which we build InfoCubes.