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In the first step of your example, you created a data source connection to a data warehouse. The credential used to create this connection is important because SSAS will use that credential to connect to the underlying database.

In the next step, a DSV is created from the data source. You can add as many tables and views as you want to the data source view; the data source view creates the base structure for cube development.

In steps 4, 5, and 6, you created a cube through Cube Wizard from the existing tables in the data source view. To create cubes, you should define your measure groups and dimensions. Measure groups are similar to the Fact tables, each measure group may contain one or more facts. In this example, the FactInternetSales table is selected as a measure group, and it contains measures such as Sales Amount and Order Quantity.

In step 7, we saw that dimensions are the second important items that should be defined when you create the cube. In the example, dimensions such as Date, Product, and Sales Territory are used. Each dimension may be connected to a dimension table in DSV or to a view that is a result of joining multiple tables of the database.

After creating the cube, you will see a view of the cube in the cube designer. The following screenshot shows the different parts of SSDT:

The Solution Explorer pane (number 1 in the screenshot) is part of SSDT that shows projects and files, data sources, DSVs, cubes, and other project-related items.

The Properties window (number 2 in the screenshot) is the place where you can view and change the properties of the selected object; for example, in the previous screenshot, the Properties window shows the properties of the Internet Sales cube.

The cube designer (number 3 in the screenshot) is the main designer in the SSDT in which you will spend most of your time as an SSAS developer. Here, you can view the layout of the cube's measure group and dimensions (number 7 in the screenshot); you can go to different tabs (number 8 in the screenshot), such as Dimension Usage, Partitions, Browser, and KPIs. We will walk through many of these tabs in this chapter.

A list of the Measure groups and their measures (number 4 in the screenshot) can be viewed in the Cube Structure tab. You can also see two different lists of dimensions: first is the database's dimensions (number 6 in the screenshot) and second is the cube's dimensions (number 5 in the screenshot). The difference between the cube's and the database's dimension is that there might be some dimensions in the database that are not used in this cube (for example, consider an SSAS project with multiple cubes). On the other hand, there might be a single database dimension that is used multiple times in one cube, which we will call the role-playing dimension (for example, there is only one database dimension, Date, but there are three role-playing dimensions in the cube, which are named Order Date, Ship Date, and Due Date).

One of the benefits of creating a cube from a wizard is that it will automatically create all the relationships between the database dimensions and the measure groups, based on the relationship defined in the DSV.