Defining Analysis Services Dimensions - SQL Server Analysis Services 2012 Cube Development - page 56

to the Employee attribute and hence can be queried as the member property of the
Employee attribute. To expose the e-mail address member property within Ex-
cel pivot table you would right-click on the Employee attribute (once it is selected on
rows' axis) and navigate to Show Properties In Report | Email Address . Keep in
mind that Analysis Services will not build indexes on any attributes for which the At-
tributeHierarchyEnabled property is set to "false". This will shorten the dimen-
sion's processing time but will also result in slower query performance for disabled
attributes.
The AttributeHierarchyVisible property controls whether the attribute shows
up in the list of attributes through which you can browse the data. The default value
is true. Normally, it is recommended to set this property to false for attributes that are
included in any user hierarchies. For example, since we included the promotion type
and the promotion category in the user hierarchy, we could set the AttributeHi-
erarchyVisible property for both of these attributes to false.
AttributeHierarchyOptimizedState can be set to Fully Optimized or Not
Optimized . If the attribute is rarely used, we could set it to Not Optimized to prevent
Analysis Services from building indexes for this attribute—doing so will reduce the
total dimension size and shorten the processing time. Always keep this property to
Fully Optimized (default value) for frequently used attributes to ensure the perform-
ance is optimal.
The DefaultMember property defines the member of the attribute hierarchy that is
queried if the MultiDimensional eXpressions ( MDX ) statement does not explicitly
reference a member from this hierarchy. You will learn the essentials of the MDX
query language in Chapter 6 , MDX . For now it's important to note that regardless
of which hierarchies are explicitly mentioned in the MDX query, all hierarchies are
queried. If a hierarchy isn't mentioned in the statement, its default member will be
queried. Each hierarchy has a default member implicitly specified; by default, it is
the All member. For example, if an MDX query doesn't reference any member of the
PromotionType attribute hierarchy, the query will return values for all the promotion
types. You can set the DefaultMember attribute by clicking on the ellipsis button
next to this property; this activates the Set Default Member dialog. You can choose
No custom default , choose a member from the list or specify an MDX expression
to derive the default member. The last option is useful if you want to determine the
default member dynamically. For example, in a time dimension, you could specify
the MDX to identify the current month and use it as the default member. Alternat-