Thursday, March 29, 2012

Does SSAS allow implementation of SCD?

Can I implement a slowly changing dimension type 2 in SSAS. I am looking at creating an SSAS cube which can pull data directly from an operational OLTP database. The source database does not maitain history of changes for the dimensions, and I wanted to know if SSAS will help me keep that history by defining certain dimensions as a SCD. If so how do I define that rule. All tutorials I have read only skim on that topic and don't describe the steps/ways to define it in SSAS. Any help would be appreciated.

While you can use type 2 SCDs (and any other implementation of an SCD) in SSAS, it is not the thing that implements them.

You need to implement them in a Datamart/Datawarehouse and SSAS will then read them from there. What might be of interest to you is the Slowly Changing Dimension task in SSIS. It's not the quickest of components, but it does allow you to use a GUI to define the columns that you want to tracking history on.

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