Modification of the OLAP cube before its' creation

J

Jiri Khun

Hi, I have following problem:
We are building every day OLAP cube. There are also some pre-definied time
dimensions (year, quarter, month, day). But we need include also the week
into these dimensions. The atribute Week normally exists in the Microsoft SQL
tables.

And the question - is it possible to choose which atributes will be included
when I OLAP cube will be created?

Thank you for your help.
Jirka Khun
 
J

John M.

Adding the week dimension is a common need; however, it is not included in
the standard cubes. The week of year (e.g. 2006 week 1, week 2) field is
available in the staging table for the cube, but the standard Time dimension
does not use it. There are probably three choices:

1. Purchase an add-on to extend the cube. One commonly referenced add-on
can be found at the following URL: http://www.bogdanov-associates.com/eng.asp

2. You could extend the OLAP build process yourself. If you want to handle
this yourself, refer to Bob Segrest's white paper at:
http://www.projectserverexperts.com/Downloads/Forms/AllItems.aspx

3. You could manually build a new dimension in the analysis services
manager leveraging the existing year and week of year fields in the staging
table. Then add this dimension to the cubes/virtual cube. Problem with this
is that I don't believe the dimension gets reprocessed wehenever the related
cubes do. So you could end up getting an error when the cube build process
runs because there may be missing members from the dimension.

Having personally added the week dimension to the build process before, I
will say that it does require patience...and given that the cube build
process is system resource intensive, you need to be careful to not degrade
performance too much.

Good luck.

John M.
 
D

Didier Maignan - Interprojet

The mentionned add-on is not only concerning adding Week but also task and so
on. SO it explains its hig cost. We have developped in Dot Net, the week
dimension for Project Server 2003, and only this. It took us about one month,
from the dev to the doc, which automate the process . To mention : Sometimes
week X are across 2 months, so to keep the month amount we splitted the data
in two week x : one in each month. We saw some VB Stuff on the web, but
prefer C# Dot net, which does not require any editing in the Registry at all.
You can see the result on : http://www.interprojet.com/9_2_week.htm

Didier
 
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