Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
tion of multiple seed values like interest rates and risk acceptance percentages.
In the end, some optimal state will emerge, such as allocating $100 million to low
risk, $250 million for moderate risk, and $150 million to high risk businesses.
In financial applications (corporate plan, budget, and forecast systems), most of
the time the UDM is applied as a data gathering and analysis business model to
gather data input from all departments, and perform many what-if analyses for fu-
ture business decisions. Once the analysts make a final decision, the data values
need to be updated in the cube for appropriate actions to be taken. For example,
the budget for a department might get allocated based on the current year's rev-
enue and that department would have to plan the next fiscal year's financial plans
based on the allocated budget. If the executives have made a forecast of achieving
specific revenue for the next year, other business decisions need to be propagated
to the people in the corporate food chain appropriately. For example, if the sales
target for the organization was to have 500 million dollars (10% growth over the
current year), the business goals or commitments for the individual sales employ-
ees need to be appropriately set to reach the organization goal. In this section you
learn how to effectively use Analysis Services to provide what-if scenarios to top
executives and to update the cube data so that it can be appropriately propagated
to the entire organization. Updating the data in an Analysis Services cube is re-
ferred to as cell writeback because you are updating the cell values in the cube
space.
You will use the cube created in the previous section to learn about up-
dating data within the cube. Consider the scenario where you need to
allocate the budget amount for the group lead by Amy Alberts. Amy has
three employees reporting to her and the budget needs to be distrib-
uted to her reports based on certain business factors. You will consider
examples of various ways in which allocation of data can be accom-
plished with the cube's data. Analysis Services 2005 does not provide a
front-end interface to update cube data unlike updating dimension data
through the dimension browser. However, you can build your own ap-
plication once you know what MDX statements to send to Analysis Ser-
vices. Hence the examples you see in this section are primarily MDX
statements, which you need to execute through SQL Server Manage-
ment Studio to help you understand how to update the cube data. The
following steps show how to make modifications to the cube so that you
can use the database for understanding data allocation and update of
cube data:
Search WWH ::
Custom Search