Building Basic Dimensions and Cubes - Expert Cube Development with SSAS Multidimensional Models - page 46

A note about naming
At various points in the New Dimension wizard, you have the chance
to rename the dimension and attributes from whatever the wizard
has guessed at as the default. It's a good idea to take naming seriously
even at this early stage and discuss with your end users what the
names of dimensions and attributes should be. Changing object names
later in the development cycle can break any calculations or queries
that you've already defined. Also, when you create an object for the
first time, its Object ID property is set to its name, and even though
you can subsequently change the name, the ID (which you'll see if you
script the object out to XMLA, for example) can never change, which
can be confusing if you ever need to work directly with XMLA code.
Object names should also be as end user friendly as possible, as they're
going to be the names that appear in the reports the end users want
to build. The corollary of this is that object names are unlikely to be in
a format that anyone with database design experience would choose.
You might be happy with a dimension called DimProduct or an
attribute called Usr_Addr_FrstLn , but when the CEO gets his sales
report, he's not going to want to see these names. Think of designing
a cube as designing a user interface for data access by non-technical
business people.

Using the Dimension Editor
Once you've completed the wizard, you'll arrive in the Dimension Editor for your
new dimension.

Adding new attributes
It's likely that you'll want to add some more attributes to your dimension, and to do
so, you can simply drag columns from the tables displayed in the Data Source View
pane on the right-hand side of the screen, into the Attributes pane on the left-hand
side. Once again, there are a couple of important properties you'll want to set on each
of your attributes once you've created them:

•

KeyColumns , NameColumn : They are the column or columns that represent
the key and the name of this attribute. It's common for non-key attributes to
be based on just one column that represents both the key and the name. For
example, a Year attribute on a Time dimension might have values such as
2001 and 2002 . In this situation, it's sufficient to set the KeyColumns property
and not set the NameColumn property.