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SSAS Adding Items not part of Dimension

  • September 15, 2014 at 4:50 am

    #397342

    Hello all,

    I am new to SSAS and am working on my first cube. I have gone through several books and can build on the sample database just fine, but now I am in the real world.

    What I have is one big table that has all my data in it. (40 million rows) I have used views to break this out into tables that SSAS can use.

    Here is the rub . . Some of the columns do not fit a Dimension build. Like was the Sale a wholesaler or not, Did the customer use a coupon, what country was it shipped to, etc..

    How do I get these into the cube with out building views with two columns a primary key and a Y or N.

    Any articles or videos or simple answer would be great.

    Thanks in advance.

    Doug

  • September 15, 2014 at 7:08 am

    #1745455

    I'm assuming that the grain of your Fact table is at the individual Sale level, right?

    There are a number of methods you could use to cater for the attributes of the Sale that you mention. Without knowing your business model, I can only generalize, but if your Sales are made by a Store or Reseller, the attribute denoting whether the Store/Reseller was a Wholesaler or not would belong to the Store/Reseller dimension. Likewise the country to which the goods were shipped could be represented in the Fact table by a key to a Geography or Location dimension.

    For the 'was a coupon used' data, you could use:

    a degenerate dimension where it's just part of the Fact table and stored as Y/N, Yes/No, True/False

    a junk dimension which is a collection of attributes related to the Fact table, but not to each other and are stored in a dimension table of their own. Such a table will have no natural (business) key so you'd need to use either a combination of some/all attributes or an identity value as a surrogate key to uniquely identify each set of attributes.

    a Yes/No dimension which would be very small (as you point out), but has the advantage of enabling you to cater for Unknown or NULL values

    Hope this helps.

    Regards

    Lempster

  • September 16, 2014 at 2:41 am

    #1745696

    Thanks for this Lempster,

    I did some research on the two types of dimensions listed. Sounds like I need to make a few of them and place them as keys in my fact table.

    I appreciate you taking the time to help me out.

    Cheers.

    Doug

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