Adding Functionality to Your Cube - Getting Started with SQL Server 2012 Cube Development - page 196

Building budget solutions using

writeback

Many companies implement budgeting solutions using tools such as Excel. While this
can be very flexible and easy for users to use, they come with a big drawback—you
have a hard time comparing actual figures from your data warehouse with budget fig-
ures from the Excel solution. Analysis Services and Excel 2010 contains a solution to
this in the form of a function called writeback .

Write-back allows users to type in values in a client application and allows Analysis
Services to perform calculations and write the values back to a database. This is
something that can be used to implement budgeting solutions that can be used by
hundreds and even thousands of users.

To implement a write-back solution in Analysis Services, perform the following steps:

1. Open up the Adventure Works DW2012.dsv Data Source View file.
2. Right-click on the designer and choose Add/Remove Tables :

3. Add the FactSalesQuota table to your Data Source View.
4. Create a relationship between the following columns by dragging the column
from the FactSalesQuota table to the DimDate table.