April 10, 2007 at 7:22 pm
I need to design an OLAP Cube in Analysis Services and need to document it. What's the easiest way to do this (I'd prefer to document before design)? Is there an "ERD" for OLAP Cubes, and can AS2000 create them?
April 10, 2007 at 9:01 pm
There's definitely a post-creation documentor (I think from Aus, this is the link from a previous post). If you're stuck with AS2K there used to even be a Word Document template with macros attached that would document the As DB for you. It was a little slow and cludgy but worked in general. Amazingly you can still find that on the msft website (look here then jump to Olap Scribe)
As far designing cubes goes, the good guys (and of course Sarah) over at Symmetry have put out a Visio template that (IMHO) is really quite good for designing OLAP solutions. Having your solution well documented should get everyone involved in the project on the same page. As far as automating it goes, you could use the Visio diagram as an input to their BI Framework Generator which would do the heavy lifting for you. I've not used this part so can't comment on it any more than that.
Failing the Symmetry approach, you could go for a really simple Visio style diagram as per one of Kimball 's books, you'd know if you'd seen it -> basically a circle in the center with single connecting lines to other circles, evening distributed around the center circle. The one in the centre represents the [logical] fact and the linked ones represent the dimensions. This of course then requires you to create other pages in the diagram to include all of the attributes/hierachies etc to be included in the dims, also needs expansion on the contents (measures) in the fact/s. We used these for quite a long while at a place i worked at a couple of years ago with medium levels of success.
While we're on the manual hand-drawn approach, you could always track down someone who'd been on (what's probably now the old, old) Cognos transformer course. They used to have a standardised form type approach, showed dimensions across as columns and the measures as simple text names at the bottom. Allowed for multiple hierarchies but definitely wouldn't work overly wellin a AS 2K5 paradigm with the attribute dimensions.
Steve.
April 10, 2007 at 9:06 pm
Forgot to mention Tom Chesters Excel documentor for As2K too, i think it's still available here.
Cheers,
Steve.
April 10, 2007 at 11:16 pm
Thanks Steve, that's really useful.
That Excel sheet is really clever.
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