We're looking at breaking "mother cubes" up into smaller component domain cubes. That gives us the ability to run targetteddomain area cubes in specific areas in the businss, but also for smaller projects to inherit the bits and pieces they need from each domain cube, with dimension security to limit the data they see. E.g. we might have a detailed Sales cube in the Sales Dept and a detailed Finance cube in the Finance department. We may wish to create a cube in Head Office that inherits a subset of each of these cubes for aggregated, Head Office reporting.
Problem - all our domain cubes have an identical Time dimension. When we link to multiple cubes, and inherit the Time dimension from each, we end up with Time and Time [1]. If we leave Time out and define it locally, inherited measure groups can't be dimensioned by the local Time dimension.
Am I missing something? This is a bit of a show stopper.
Thanks
Mick
Why not:
1. Host the conformant dimensions, such as Time, in the Head Office cube?
2. Domain-specific cubes link to the conformant dimensions in the core cube?
You may find the following post useful.
Another, much easier to implement option, is to have all cubes in the same database. Since you can secure cube dimensions you can secure the cubes independently. In this way you will avoid linking objects across databases.
Thanks for the quick replies.
I don't think hosting all the cubes in the same project is an option - we're with a multinational company with business units worldwide and they all host their own hardware, and solutions - we are just looking for ways to encourage reuse and prevent data being moved and copied multiple times.
I'll look into the two-way inheritance option. I guess what we're saying is that Time is never inherited by the Departmental cubes, its always hosted locally. The domain cubes can inherit a Time dimension from a departmental cube....are we still ok with measure groups in a domain cube being inherited by multiple departmental cubes, only one of which provides the Time dimension in the opposite direction?
I guess what we're saying is that Time is never inherited by the Departmental cubes, its always hosted locally.
The idea was to define the shared (comformant) dimensions in a main database and link to them.
Are we still ok with measure groups in a domain cube being inherited by multiple departmental cubes, only one of which provides the Time dimension in the opposite direction?
Unfortunately, a linked measure group can only be browsed by dimensions defined in the same (linked) database so the bi-directional linking (conformant dimensions to domain cubes and domain measure groups to main cube) won't work for the head office consolidated reporting scenario. Instead of linking the measure groups back to the main database, can't you use regular measure groups in the main database? Granted this will result in duplication of storage and defnition.