Katmai June CTP - Attribute Relationships tab

As everybody knows by now, the first widely public CTP of Katmai has been released on Microsoft connect site. It is accompanied by documentation about what are the new features expected in SQL 2008. But this documentation is a little bit too high level, and also it doesn't tell which piece of the planned functionality is included in the June CTP and which one isn't. I am going to cover one feature for the Analysis Services. Since none of the interesting OLAP engine features and performance improvements are included in this release, I will talk about UI part - specifically about new tab in the dimension editor called "Attribute Relationships". It has been explained many times and on many occasions that attribute relationships are very important both for the performance of the system and for the correctness of the results. Yet, in the Business Intelligence Development Studio (aka BIDS) the UI for defining attribute relationships was not optimal (drag and drop in the tree view), and the visual representation of the relationship lattice was missing. The BIDSHelper project by Greg Galloway and Darren Gosbell somewhat filled the gap for the visualization in SSAS 2005 with the Visualize Attribute Lattice addin. In Katmai, SSAS team rightfully decided to give the subject full attention by dedicating special tab in the dimension editor. I decided to test how well this UI can handle less trivial scenarios. As a test case I have chosen simplified version of the Time dimension. The structure that I wanted was the one outlined in my blog about calculations in the Time dimension - on the picture on the below.