Extending and Customizing Cubes - SQL Server Analysis Services 2012 Cube Development - page 152

Defining perspectives
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Analysis Services perspectives are similar to
views defined in the relational database. Each multidimensional SSAS project could
contain multiple cubes, several measure groups, hundreds of measures, many hier-
archies, and thousands of attributes. Many cube users might only need a subset of
these attributes to get their job done. Including unnecessary options in the reports and
analytical views could simply confuse data consumers; instead, you should try to ex-
pose only the essential attributes to each user group by defining perspectives. Unlike
relational views, perspectives should not be used for implementing security; they are
simply intended to conceal the complexity of your solution.
The Adventure Works sample multidimensional database contains several per-
spectives, for example, the Direct Sales perspective exposes Internet Sales ,
Internet Orders , Internet Customers , and Exchange Rates measure
groups, whereas the Finance perspective includes measures only from the Finan-
cial Reporting and Exchange Rates measure groups. The two perspectives
also expose different sets of KPIs, actions and calculations because the groups of
employees using the two perspectives are likely to be interested in different datasets.
How to do it...
To define a perspective, the following steps need to be followed:
1. Connect to the Adventure Works cube using SSDT and navigate to the
Perspectives tab. Right-click anywhere within this tab, and choose New Per-
spective . Alternatively, you could click on the New Perspective icon found in
the upper left-hand corner of the Perspectives tab.
2. Give the perspective a descriptive name to ensure that your users can quickly
identify its purpose.
3. Define the Default Measure for the perspective by picking one of the meas-
ures from the drop-down list. The default measure is returned in a query
that does not explicitly specify requested measures or uses the meas-
ures.defaultmember syntax to reference the desired measure.
4. Uncheck the measures, hierarchies, attributes, KPIs, actions, and calculations
that should not be available within the current perspective. By default, each