Measures and Measure Groups - Expert Cube Development with SSAS Multidimensional Models - page 79

Measures and
Measure Groups

With our dimensions designed, we can now turn our attention to the cube itself.
Taking the basic version of the cube that the New Cube wizard built for us as a
starting point, we'll want to add all the dimensions we've built to it, add data from
more than one measure group, and make sure that the measures in our cube always
aggregate up the way we want them to. In this chapter, we'll take a look at the
following topics in detail:

• Useful properties to set on measures

• Measure aggregation types and other functionality that affects how

measures aggregate

• Using multiple measure groups

• Setting up the relationships between measure groups and dimensions

Measures and aggregation
Measures are the numeric values that our users want to aggregate, slice, dice and
otherwise analyze, and as a result, it's important to make sure they behave the way
we want them to. One of the fundamental reasons for using Analysis Services is that,
unlike a relational database, it allows us to build into our cube design business rules
about measures: how they should be formatted, how they should aggregate up, how
they interact with specific dimensions, and so on. It's therefore no surprise that we'll
spend a lot of our cube development time thinking about measures.