Cubes

To create a new cube you should right click the Cubes folder in the Solution Explorer on the right hand side of Visual Studio.

Essentially, what you do when you create a new cube is to select one more tables that contain your numbers of interest – your measures.

Go through the Cube Wizard step by step to create the basic content of a cube.

If we looked at the content of the Sales Invoice Line tab we would see a number of fields that would prove suitable for being used as a measure.

Of course, you will need some knowledge about your data in order to select the relevant measures from the table. The next step in the Cube Wizard is actually just showing all the fields from the table that has a numeric data type.

To become a measure, a field must be of a numeric data type. But not all numeric data types are necessarily measures. E.g. in the Sales Invoice Line table, the Type column is more likely suitable for a dimension than a measure.

Measures:

• Quantity – the number of units that have been sold per transaction.
• Amount – the value, or revenue, per transaction.

Next step of the Cube Wizard offers you an option to include all or some of the already existing dimensions. You can regard the Dimensions folder as a pool of dimensions from which you can select when creating a new cube. Some dimensions will be common to most, if not all cubes, while other dimensions may be specific to a single cube only.

As the last step of the Cube Wizard you should give the new cube a proper name. In this case, since we are dealing with sales data, we might name it the Sales Cube.