Summary

With processing complete, you can take a look at your cube for the first time, either in the Browser tab of the Cube Editor or in your client tool of choice. Now is a good time to reflect on what we've seen of the cube development process so far. We've created a very basic cube from a single fact table and a few dimensions rather than attempting to build something more complex. This has allowed us to get a feel for our data and have something to show our users quickly so that they can check if we're on the right track. We then built a single Data Source and Data Source View. Since we spent time getting our data modeling right earlier, there was very little to do here other than connect to our data warehouse and select the tables or views we want to work with. Next, we built a few of the less complex dimensions we need, configuring attribute relationships and creating user hierarchies as necessary. Finally, we ran the New Cube wizard to build our basic cube, then deployed and processed it so that it can be queried.

In the next chapter, we'll go on to look at how we can deal with more complex problems when designing dimensions.