Hi,

We are designing a cube with a large customer dimension (> 4 million
members). The dimension has many attributes associated with it such as age,
gender, location type info etc. How do I expose the details to the users. Am
I best to put virtual dimensions on the member properties, or should I put a
new dimension for each attribute? Should I create a snowflaked ROLAP
dimension?

Excel is the client so I can't expose the member properties that way.

Any suggestions?

If you're using using Excel XP or later, you can directly access
Dimension Member Properties from Excel:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de.../en-us/dnexcl2
k2/html/odc_xlsql.asp
OLAP Member Property Fields are Supported

OLAP databases support a feature called Member Property Fields. Member
property fields are additional fields of information about a particular
member in the OLAP database, but information that is not part of the
dimension of information. For instance, a dimension may consist of the
levels: Customer State, Customer City, and Customer Name. And for the
field Customer Name, there might be several different other related
pieces of information about the customer that are not part of the levels
of the dimension, such as age, gender, occupation, income, and so on.
These additional related pieces of information are called Member
properties in the OLAP database, and you can use the menu item on the
PivotTable drop-down menu on the PivotTable toolbar called Property
Fields to access them.

- Deepak

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Another question acutally. We have address information as a member property on the customer dimension and some of the information is lower case in the table but is showing up at Upper case as a member property. The selection seems to be random in which one gets changed. Is there a property that is causing this or is it a bug??

Hello,

I learned that there is a display problem with the member property on your
side. As far as I know, there is not such a property with Analysis server.
If you check the member property using Analysis Manager directly, does the
same problem occur?

It seems that this problem is not mostly related with original one. In
order to concentrate fully on your issue, it is best that you can post it
as a separate thread. On that way each issue can receive full attention and
will also make the thread more clear and consistent for others reference.
Please feel free to open a new post for this issue and we will be very glad
to work with you. Thanks for your understanding.

Regards,

Michael Shao
Microsoft Online Partner Support
Get Secure! - www.microsoft.com/security
This posting is provided "as is" with no warranties and confers no rights.

Hi Aaron,

I'm including some supplemental information for your reference. With that
size of a dimension I would keep the member properties to a minimum. Only
use them if you absolutely have to. If you use Virtual dimensions the
benefit there is that they don't have to be processed as a full dimension,
but Analysis Services could send all of the member properties down to the
client for each level in the result which could generate slow responses.

With a regular dimension for each property it will save the client from
having all the properties loaded, but it will consume memory on the server.

The first item to look at is how much memory is this large dimension
consuming on the server. I'm assuming that it is loading in a VLDM process,
if it is designed as a MOLAP storage. If the dimension doesn't consume all
the memory then I would consider first to create regular dimensions for the
properties. Remember to use the "Depends on Dimension" property so the
aggregations are created correctly.

If adding the extra dimensions are causing memory problems for the server
then go with the Virtual Dimensions, but beware that this could pull down a
lot of data to the client depending on the query.

I would only go to the ROLAP storage for dimensions as the last resort,
because the performance you would find would be very very slow.

You would consider the 3GB switch for the Operating system or moving to a
64bit platform if this dimension is to grow at any rate.

For more information regarding this issue, please refer to the following
article.
295443 INF: How To Enable Analysis Server to Use 3 GB of RAM
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=295443

Thanks for posting in community.

Best regards,

Michael Shao
Microsoft Online Partner Support
Get Secure! - www.microsoft.com/security
This posting is provided "as is" with no warranties and confers no rights.