Chapter 2. Building Basic Dimensions and Cubes

Having prepared our relational source data, we're now ready to start designing a cube and some dimensions. This chapter covers the steps you need to go through in order to create simple dimensions and cubes, and although you may be confident that you know how to do this already, we encourage you to read through this chapter nonetheless. You may be familiar with the overall process, but some of the detailed recommendations that we make may be new to you, and they could save you a lot of time and effort later on in your project.

In this chapter, we'll be taking a look at the following topics:

From a methodology point of view, this chapter represents the creation of the first draft of your cube. In subsequent chapters, we'll look at how you tackle the more advanced modeling problems. However, there are a lot of advantages in taking an iterative and incremental approach to cube development. If you're unfamiliar with your data or Analysis Services, it will allow you to get something up and running quickly so that you can be sure that it works properly.

It will also allow you to show your end users something quickly too, so that they can ensure it meets their expectations and that they can check over it for problems. This doesn't mean you shouldn't concentrate on getting what you build at this stage right first time though, far from it, but it is easier to get the details correct when you're concentrating on a small subset of the solution you hope to build eventually. We therefore recommend you to pick the most important fact table in your data warehouse plus a few of the more straightforward dimensions that join to it, one of which should be the Time dimension, and open up SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT).