SSAS: Currency Conversion
A sometimes challenging business requirement is the concept of global transactions and sales. As a company, if you have sales in say, the United States, Canada, Germany, and Brazil, how do you report all of those sales together? There are 3 different ways the business could potentially want those reports. The first is that I want all of my reporting done in 1 currency that's been standardized. Using the 4 countries above, let's say that's US Dollars. The second way I might want to view it is as stored as the native currency, and reporting is done in the native currency. The third is that everything is converted to one currency while it is stored and I want to report it as its native currency. Fortunately, with SSAS it's easy to implement a solution that can provide the reporting around different currency types and SQL Server even as has a money type to make it easier to store this data. Each of the 3 different types is very similar in implementation from an Analysis Services wizard standpoint.
Read more...