To be or not to be, testing your cube's existence

Angela Hall
Angela Hall|February 22, 2012

Unlike BASE SAS tables, OLAP cubes must exist in within the metadata in order to access from any of the OLAP Viewers. In addition to having some metadata OLAP cubes have a physical file structure presence (at least for MOLAP/HOLAP because it’s a different story for ROLAP). When you refresh [...]

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Skipping through OLAP to find your value

Angela Hall
Angela Hall|February 20, 2012

One of the cool things with SAS OLAP Viewer in Add-in to Microsoft Office is your ability to skip right into a specific value. Out of the box, viewing OLAP cubes can lead you to believe that in order to view a specific value you need to click-thru a hierarchy [...]

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Best practices for refreshing production OLAP cubes

Angela Hall
Angela Hall|February 9, 2012

Unlike prior versions of SAS OLAP technology, 9.2 provides more options for maintaining and refreshing OLAP cubes. With this comes some discussion about what each one does alone, and how pairing these techniques really provides SAS OLAP Server Administrators and cube developers a cornucopia of OLAP options. PROC OLAPOPERATE Remember [...]

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Building custom measures for OLAP cubes

Angela Hall
Angela Hall|December 8, 2011

In one minute (and 10 seconds, but are you measuring that?) you can add a custom measure (also known as calculated members) to your OLAP cube. Watch this video to create a simple calculation multiplying units * price. Remember that this mechanism is not just used for multiplications, you can [...]

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OLAP users can fall into the abyss of detail data

Angela Hall
Angela Hall|December 5, 2011

OLAP cube developers might have noticed that the amount of time required to generate any aggregation (including the NWAY) can negatively impact their productivity. Developers remove the NWAY aggregation (following the sample screens in a prior post) to significantly reduce build time and allow quick modifications to the cube definition. [...]

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Limit the number of drill-through to detail records available from OLAP cubes

Angela Hall
Angela Hall|November 9, 2011

Drill-through to detail is the ability to right click within a cell of a web report or OLAP viewer and request the detail source records that make up that specific cell’s measure. The maximum number of records, by default, is set to 300,000. Feasibly the report user could download all [...]

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Organizing and promoting OLAP cube jobs

Angela Hall
Angela Hall|September 19, 2011

One of the sweet new capabilities in 9.2 OLAP for cube developers is the Cube Job that is automatically created for each new cube. The job is used as a interface mechanism to schedule the cube refresh code without manually retrieving the PROC OLAP code and customizing it for scheduling which we “old” [...]

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Enabling OLAP drill-through to detail for web reports

Angela Hall
Angela Hall|September 9, 2011

I mentioned back in 2008 that Web Reports with OLAP source can drill-through to detail (or display the raw data records for the corresponding cross tabular cell) only after the source information map has drill-through to detail enabled. Well, there are several other areas that also could disable this capability [...]

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Making OLAP Drill Through to Detail Data Available as Dataset in EG Project

Angela Hall
Angela Hall|July 14, 2011

In order to make the OLAP drill through data available as data tables in the Enterprise Guide, all you need to do is change the option to automatically insert the results as a data set in the project. This is extremely useful if part of your workflow includes navigating through [...]

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Create a fully summarized table for OLAP Cubes

Angela Hall
Angela Hall|March 21, 2011

SAS procedure SUMMARY is a quick method of converting your detail table to a fully summarized one. Included is a sample. The key option to set is the NWAY – this generates the lowest level of summary for use in the OLAP cube. Essentially – the class statement contains all [...]

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