Measures and Measure Groups in Microsoft Analysis Services (Part 1 and 2)
In this two-part article by Chris Webb, we will look at measures and measure groups, ways to control how measures aggregate up, and how dimensions can be related to measure groups. In this part, will cover useful properties of measures, along with built-in measure aggregation types and dimension calculations.
Measures and aggregation
Measures are the numeric values that our users want to aggregate, slice, dice and otherwise analyze, and as a result, it's important to make sure they behave the way we want them to. One of the fundamental reasons for using Analysis Services is that, unlike a relational database it allows us to build into our cube design business rules about measures: how they should be formatted, how they should aggregate up, how they interact with specific dimensions and so on. It's therefore no surprise that we'll spend a lot of our cube development time thinking about measures.
Tags: design