Exploring OLAP Cube with Visual Basic
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Have you ever wanted to take a closer look at OLAP cubes? If so, you have come to the right article. A subset of the fine details of the highly structured OLAP cube is probed in this tutorial using Visual Basic.
Introduction
In an earlier tutorial the mechanics involved in accessing OLAP data from MS Excel were described. Pivot table service provided by the Analytical Services was used to access the data. In this tutorial, we will look at programmatically exploring the various structural details of the Cube, a basic unit of storage of data used in analyzing business related data. In a future article, creating the cube from scratch will be described, but you should also review the online tutorial that is bundled with Microsoft Analytical Services; it takes you through a tour that helps with understanding Analytical Services. This tutorial is divided into the following sections:
- Cube Basics
- Measures and Dimensions
- Cube details under investigation
- Using VB to explore the OLAP Cube
- Creating a VB project
- Add library references
- Storing global variables in the module
- Properties of the Cube
- Properties of Dimensions
- Properties of Hierarchies
- Properties of Members
- Properties of Levels
Cube Basics In Analytical Services, measures and dimensions describe a cube. The dimensions and measures are derived from the cube's data source. The set of tables with their relationships used to derive the dimensions and measures is called the cube's schema. The cube consists of a single fact table and one or more dimension tables. Measures are obtained from columns in the fact table, and dimensions are obtained from the columns of the dimension table.
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