Introduction

Suppose you work for Orion Star Sports & Outdoors, a fictitious retail company that sells sporting goods and outdoor products, such as shoes, clothes, and gear for a number of different sports. Sales managers within Orion Star need quick access to information such as which products are being sold, where those products are being sold, and when those products are being sold.

To give the sales managers the information that they need, you can create OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) cubes. An OLAP cube is a set of data that is organized and structured in a hierarchical, multidimensional arrangement, often with many dimensions and levels of data. The way that OLAP data is stored makes it readily available for detailed queries and analysis.

  Diagram of OLAP cube


Using the OLAP cubes that you create, the sales managers can dynamically analyze data that has been summarized into multidimensional views and hierarchies. This means that Orion Star sales managers can retrieve answers to multidimensional business questions quickly and easily.

To create the cubes, you can use SAS OLAP Cube Studio, which is a Java interface for defining and building OLAP cubes. Using SAS OLAP Cube Studio, you can build OLAP cubes that provide high-performance access to large amounts of summarized data for complex multidimensional analysis and easy reporting.

This lesson guides you through the process of using SAS OLAP Cube Studio to define and create an OLAP cube.



2 hours



In this lesson, you learn to do the following:

  • create a metadata profile and open an existing metadata profile
  • define a source library
  • define metadata for source tables
  • specify general cube attributes
  • specify input data sources
  • define dimensions, levels, and hierarchies
  • select measures
  • define aggregations
  • build a cube
  • view a cube's structure
  • edit a cube definition

be familiar with the following:

  • common computer terminology
  • your operating environment, including its file structure and basic commands
  • your browser, monitor, keyboard, and mouse

Note In this lesson, you practice using a simulated version of SAS OLAP Cube Studio. To use the actual software, you must have SAS OLAP Cube Studio licensed at your site. Contact your site administrator if you have questions regarding the availability of SAS OLAP Cube Studio at your site.