I am working with a customer dimension table that was designed with most
attributes appearing twice as current and historical (type 1 and type 2).
The current version was included so we could answer questions like how much
money have customers that are currently gold members spent with us over the
last 5 years - knowing that they were not gold members over the entire 5
years as indicated in the type 2 dimension.

Could we have answered the same question using an MDX statement without
including the type 1 version of the same attribute? Right now I have almost
double the number of attributes in my customer dimension because of this
implementation and there are a lot of attributes. I'm looking for a better
way to implement this. Another option is to have two customer dimensions -
one with the type 1 attributes and one with type 2 attributes. However that
would use up a lot of space because my customer dimension has millions of
rows.

I am concerned that having two versions of each attribute in the same
dimension will cause confusion for the users and have never seen an example
of this implemented, so I would like to know how other people are designing
their cubes to answer these type of questions.

Here is a link to a Kimball article which addresses this issue:
http://www.intelligententerprise.com...cleID=59301280
I guess the question requiring the current attribute cannot be retrieved
using MDX, so duplication of the attribute is required - unless SSAS 2005 has
a new feature that handles this.


"bhorwatt" wrote: