Dimension Design - Professional SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 with MDX - page 215

Summary
At the beginning of each episode of the television serial "The Twilight Zone"
the viewer was exhorted to not adjust their television set. With all due respect
to Rod Serling, just the opposite is true with Analysis Services 2005. Yes, you
will get great results from using the Dimension Wizard and other wizards in
BIDS, but for optimal results, you will want to fine-tune what those wizards pro-
duce. A great example is using the Properties window to assign descriptive
names to an attribute which might otherwise harbor some obscure name com-
ing from a source database. More profoundly, you can use the Dimension
Designer to create translations for the attributes and hierarchies of a dimen-
sion into another language.
In addition to learning about dimensions, you learned the necessity of deploy-
ing your dimension to the instance of Analysis Services where the dimension is
processed by retrieving the data from the data source. Processing is essential
to enable the user to browse a dimension. The communication between BIDS
and an instance of Analysis Services is accomplished through a SOAP-based
XML API called XML/A (XML for Analysis), which is an industry standard. Even
more interesting is that dimensions stored in Analysis Services are represen-
ted internally as cubes — one-dimensional cubes; and what a coincidence, be-
cause cubes are the topic of Chapter 6 .