Building Basic Dimensions and Cubes - Expert Cube Development with SSAS Multidimensional Models - page 56

Using the New Cube wizard
On the Select Creation Method step of the wizard, as with the same step of the
New Dimension wizard, choose the Use an existing table option—the Create an
Empty Cube and the Generate Tables in the Data Source options can be ignored
for now. The former is useful in more advanced scenarios, but regarding the latter,
we'll repeat what we said earlier: you should model your data properly in the data
warehouse before you start building anything in Analysis Services. On the Select
Measure Group Tables step, just select the fact table you chose earlier as the basis
for the simple cube you want to build. Then in the Select Measures step, select one
or two columns from that fact table that represents commonly used measures, which
can be aggregated by summation. On the Select Existing Dimensions , select all
the dimensions that you've just built that join to the fact table you've chosen. Don't
bother creating any new dimensions on the Select New Dimensions step. Finally,
on the Completing the Wizard step, enter the name of the cube and click on Finish .
As was the case when creating dimensions, it's worth putting some thought into the
name of your cube. Try to make the name reflect the data the cube contains, make
sure the name is meaningful to the end users and keep it short, as you'll probably
have to type this name hundreds of times over the lifetime of the project.
Project deployment
With the wizard complete, go to the Build menu in the main Visual Studio menu bar
and select Deploy < MyProjectName >. Deployment is actually a two-stage process:
• First the project is built. You can think of this as being similar to compiling
some .NET code, except instead of an executable or a dll , the end result is
four files containing the XMLA representation of the objects in your project,
and information on how the project should be deployed. You can find these
files in the bin directory of your Visual Studio project directory.
• Then the project is deployed. This takes the XMLA created in the previous
step, wraps it in an XMLA Alter command and then executes that command
against your Analysis Services server. Executing this command either creates
a new Analysis Services database if one did not exist before, or updates the
existing database with any changes you've made.