Calendar hierarchy will be
dragged from the Metadata window and dropped on the design surface. Once again,
dragging the entire hierarchy over means that the dataset now includes individual
customer sales at the day level; this is potentially a huge dataset and on cubes of any
decent size, this could be a very slow query.
324 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 alternative to dragging an entire hierarchy to the design surface is to drag
over only the levels of the hierarchy that are needed for the report. For example,
if only the Year and Quarter are needed, those two levels could be dragged and
dropped on the Query Designer, resulting in a much smaller dataset, and therefore
a report that executes much faster. In addition, the default setting is for the query
designer to immediately execute the query as soon as anything changes. In order to
stop this, the developer can click the Auto Execute button on the designer??™s toolbar
to toggle the automatic execution off and on.
Another point of interest when building OLAP queries using the graphical query
designer is that there is no concept of rows and columns. Instead, the result set that
is returned from the cube??”that lovely, multidimensional cellset??”is flattened into
simple tables and rows, a two-dimensional format. Therefore, the query designer
shows the results in a flattened format as the query is being built.
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