One-to-One Attribute Relationships: Forks versus Chains
It's a fairly common occurrence to have several attributes in a dimension describing the same thing: products can have long and short descriptions, for example, or you might want to display dates in different formats, or show the full names of states or just their abbreviations. AS doesn't give you any functionality to specifically handle this - something I've heard from people who've used other OLAP tools is that it would be great to set up 'aliases' for attributes, rather like how you can set up translations - so you just have to design it into your dimension. One thing I've noticed, however, is that when you're designing attribute relationships to cater for this scenario it's tempting to do so in a particular way that leads to problems later on; at least I've done this in the past and seen several other people do the same thing, so I thought it was worth blogging about.
Tags: design, attribute relationship