Therefore, even though a cube can be built off an OLTP database, the best practice
is to perform an ETL process and populate a star schema. This book will assume that
a star schema does exist and that cubes are built from this star schema.
Starting a Project
In order to start a project, a new project is created in BIDS using the Analysis
Services Project template as shown in Figure 3-6. The New Project dialog box
allows for three items to be entered: the Name, Location, and Solution Name.
50 B u s i n e s s I n t e l l i g e n c e w i t h M i c r o s o f t O f f i c e P e r f o r m a n c e P o i n t S e r v e r 2 0 0 7
The name is the name of the project, while the solution name is the name of the
solution, where a solution holds one or more projects. In the case of cubes this
could be a one-to-one relationship, but often the solution also holds the Integration
Services project which contains the ETL used to populate the cube. The solution
might also hold a Report Server project that contains reports that access the cube
and star schema. The projects can be opened individually, but placing them all in a
solution allows developers to open one file and have access to all projects and files
of the warehouse. This is important because many other warehousing products view
ETL, cube building and reporting as completely separate and often have completely
different tools to perform those actions.
The location is simply the storage location for the files that define this project.
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