On Metadata-Driven Analysis Management Objects (Part 3)

Enhancements to the CreateNewAggregationDesign Function

Most BI practitioners will be taking full advantage of multiple-measure group support in SSAS 2005 cubes (UDMs) for a variety of reasons including support for one of the many-to-many dimension design patterns eloquently positioned by Marco Russo in his work "The Many to Many Revolution". I have two successful implementations which build on his great ideas, and, it was during this phase of development that I came across an opportunity to enhance our code base for our modest Metadata-Driven-AMO “quiver of arrows” (to quote a good friend of mine).

In order to take better advantage of multiple measure-group support in SSAS 2005 cubes, using the code listings from Part 2 of the Metadata-Driven AMO posts, you will find that it is far more appropriate to leverage the MeasureGroupDimension class instead of the CubeDimension class when adding AggregationDesignDimension objects to the .Dimensions collection of the AggregationDesign object. As you may recall, we use the AggregationDesign object to define which aggregations we will store in our cube, based on counts of dimension key attributes found in the incoming data for our new partition. The reason for this change is simple: as you iterate through a collection of CubeDimension objects, you may come across a perfectly valid CubeDimension which is not associated to the measure group partition we are generating. By using the MeasureGroupDimension class, you ensure that you are only creating aggregations relevant to your measure group partition. Moreover, both the MeasureGroupDimension class and AggregationDesignDimension class share the same inheritance lineage, so we are able to take advantage of the .CubeDimensionID property without any fuss. In Listing 10, the minor changes can be found in Section 4.

Update (14-MAY-2008):
All Listings described above may now be accessed at the link below...



- Adrian Downes