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The Unified Dimensional Model
To generate profits for a business, key strategic decisions need to be made
based on likely factors such as having the right business model, targeting the
right consumer group, pricing the product correctly, and marketing through op-
timal channels. To make the right decisions and achieve targeted growth you
need to analyze data. The data can be past sales, expected sales, or even in-
formation from competitors. The phrase "Knowledge is power" is very fitting
here because in the world of business, analyzing and comparing current sales
against the expected sales helps executives make decisions directly aligned
with the goals of the company. Such sales information is typically stored in a
distributed fashion and must be collected from various sources. Executives
making the business decisions typically do not have the capability to access
the raw sales data as formed from various locations and subsequently optim-
ized for use. The decision-makers typically rely on the aggregated data, which
is easy to understand and which facilitates the decision-making process.
Presenting aggregated data to the decision-makers quickly is a key challenge
for business intelligence providers. Analysis Services 2005 enables you to
design a model that bridges the gap between the raw data and the information
content that can be used for forming business decisions. This model, designed
through Analysis Services 2005, is called the Unified Dimensional Model
(UDM).
The UDM is central to your Analysis Services database architecture. UDM is
your friend because it helps you narrow the gap between end users and the
data. Analysis Services provides you with several features that help you
design a unified model that will serve the needs of end users. UDM, as the
name suggests, provides you with a way to encapsulate access to multiple
heterogeneous data sources into a single model. The UDM buffers you from
the difficulties of managing the integration of various data sources so you can
build your model easily. The UDM provides you with the best of OLAP and re-
lational worlds, exposing rich data and metadata for exploration and analysis.
Figure 6-1
(originally shown in
Chapter 2
,
but reprinted here for your conveni-
ence) shows you the architecture of the Unified Dimensional Model that has
been created using Analysis Services 2005. As shown in the figure, the UDM
helps you to integrate data from various data sources such as Oracle, SQL
Server, DB2, Teradata, and flat files all into a single model that merges the un-
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