When configuring a SSAS Dimension, there are many important properties to pay attention to. This blog will give you a heads up on them and why they are important:
AttributeHierarchyEnabled – This enables the attribute hierarchy for calculations, sorting, and other use.
AttributeHierarchyVisible – This controls whether the attribute is visible. If set to false, it is still available for calculation as long as it is enable. This is typically used for key columns, required for sorting and calculations, but not normally visible to users.
DiscretizationBucketCount – Allows you to specify the number of buckets you are breaking the ranges into, for instance 0-5, 5-10, 10-15 would be a DiscretizationBucketcount of 3.
DiscretizationMethod – provides several ways to "bucketize" the data into groupings to make it wasier for the users to sort and filter based on values.
Order By – This is where you can choose to order by Key or Name. BE careful here, sometimes the kay and the name are the same depending on the way your table is setup.
When we scroll down, we find a couple more important properties
Key Columns – allows you to specify the columns required to make the attribute in question unique. Once you choose multiple key columns, you need to make sure you fill in the NameColum property to ensure SSAS knows what column’s name to use, also the cube will not build if you have an attribute with multiple key columns and no namecolum chosen.
As always post your questions on the BIDN forums!
