Chapter 53. Autogenerating SSAS cubes
This chapter describes how to autogenerate cubes in SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) and the underlying relational database. It comes with a step-by-step example of how to build a tool, InstantCube, that could drastically reduce the development time of simple SSAS cubes. With a few lines of code, you can significantly reduce the effort of analyzing your data manually. InstantCube isn’t intended to be a full-featured tool but serves as an example of how to programmatically build cubes.
This chapter is divided into the following sections:
- Background—usage scenarios and technology overview
- Step-by-step example of how to implement a simple cube generator in C#
- Results and conclusions
Note
This material can be reinforced by downloading the InstantCube source code from CodePlex and reading my blog at http://www.joinsights.com for further details.
When I started programming around 1983, writing even small programs was a time-consuming process. I used paper and pen together with a list of CPU instruction codes to manually compile my programs and then had to load them into memory using POKE statements in the built-in BASIC interpreter. If the program hung, which it often did, I had to restart the computer.
