Self-service Business Intelligence, Creating Value from Data - Getting Started with SQL Server 2012 Cube Development - page 8

Now imagine creating the same query against a real system, it could easily be hun-
dreds of tables involved to extract the data that are stored in a simple data model
used for sales reporting. As you can see clearly now, working against a model that
has been optimized for reporting is much simpler when creating the reports. More in-
formation on how to structure a reporting database using dimensional modeling will
be provided in Chapter 3 , Creating Your First Multidimensional Cube .
Even with a well-structured data warehouse, many users would struggle with writing
the select query driving the report shown earlier. The users, in general, do not know
SQL. They typically do not understand the database schema since the table and
column names usually consists of abbreviations that can be cryptic to the casual
user.
What if a user would like to change the report, so that it would show data in a matrix
with the ability to drill down to lower levels? Then they most probably would need to
contact IT. IT would need to rewrite the query and change the entire report layout,
causing a delay between the need of the data and the availability.