Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Modifying Data of Members in a Dimension
Assume that James Smith worked for a year in the Marketing department and
wanted to move to a different department for his career growth. He inter-
viewed with the Engineering group and secured a new position. This data
needs to be reflected in the Employee dimension. Assume James' new man-
ager is Gail Erickson. Updating James' information in the employee dimen-
sion so that he has moved to a different organization needs to be done as a
two-step process. You need to update the reporting structure for James so
that Erickson becomes his manager and then you need to update his new de-
partment information. Now let's go ahead and update James' information.
As mentioned in the previous section, the dimension browser does not allow
you to edit the parent attribute (Manager column in this example) when you
add a new member. Similarly, you cannot update or edit the Manager column
directly. Therefore the BIDS provides the functionality of dragging and drop-
ping James' information under Erickson so that his manager's name gets up-
dated. Select the record for James in the dimension browser view with write-
back enabled and then drag and drop James under "Erickson, Gail." The
drag-and-drop operation can also be accomplished by cut-and-paste options
available in the dimension browser. To do so, select James' record, right-click,
and select Cut to remove the link from James' current manager. Then select
"Erickson Gail," right-click, and select Paste so that James is moved under
"Erickson, Gail."
You will see that James has now moved under "Erickson, Gail" and his man-
ager information has been automatically updated as shown in
Figure 11-7
.
However, other attributes of James do not get updated automatically. There
are several reasons why this is true; Analysis Services does not know what
attributes of a child are to be inherited from the parent. For example, you
might have an attribute join date instead of department. James' join date and
Erickson's join date need not be the same and hence join date for James
should not be updated automatically. In this example, you see that the De-
partment Name is one of the attributes that can be updated. It would have
been nice if the Department Name updated had been done automatically. It is
not, because you can have a business scenario where your manager might
be a person from a different department but the work you are doing might still
be the same. For example, you might have two departments coming under a
general manager. A person from one of the departments might get promoted
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