I would love to have a report with:
- dimensions down the left hand side
- cube names across the top
- and a "Y" if that cube uses that dimension

I would settle for a report from metadata of any kind.

It would be most cool if it were an ASP web page (preferred) or an
Excel spreadsheet with VBA.

I know all the info is in the OLAP Repository but I am not looking
forward to diving into that w/o some mentoring as it would take me too
long and I've got a couple of other things to do.

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.

Dimension usage page in AS2005 BI Dev studio has exactly the view you
talking about.

Edward.
--
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights



"Mel Suarez" <mel (AT) mlsuarez (DOT) com> wrote

In article <eTYxwZKOGHA.1676 (AT) TK2MSFTNGP09 (DOT) phx.gbl>,
edwardm (AT) norely (DOT) micrsoft.com says...

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...D763175B-4022-
429F-A9D5-DFE00E8545BD&DisplayLang=en

It will give you a document listing which cubes use which dimensions,
just not quite the summary that you are after. (I often use this sort of
matrix when specifying a new OLAP project)

OlapScribe is written in VBA in word which could probably be modified to
produce a summary matrix.


--
Regards
Darren Gosbell [MCSD]
Blog: http://www.geekswithblogs.net/darrengosbell

Edward. Thanks. Good to know! We're getting SQL Server 2005 some
time this year. Not here yet. Cannot wait.

Darren,

I'm checking it out now. It's crunching through all my cubes now.

Yes, I should be able to modify it to give me what I need.

Plus it should help get a typical application using the OLAP Repository
that should help with other efforts.

Thanks much,
Mel

Ok this is an awesome, awesome reporting tool. If my repository ever
gets seriously damaged, I have documentation that would help rebuild
it. The only thing that's missing is the ER diagram.

Here's are things I will (someday) change:
- It generated 500 pages of doc - so I'll probably remove most of the
carriage returns.
- Even though I told it to ignore 1/2 dozen cubes, it still included
them in the dimension listing. -- I'll have it ignore dimensions from
cubes that I'm ignoring!
- There is no mapping of what dimensions are used in what cubes -- only
what cubes use what dimensions. -- I'll add the opposite mapping as
well.
- It gives me an error message "This is not a valid action for the end
of a row." (I somehow got past this) -- Hope to fix that bug.
- It then generated some weird looking stuff at the end. -- probably
due to the above bug.

But, hey, I now have some automated documenation!

Nice job, Microsoft.

We did this before finding the AS2000 scribe tool, but using the VBA
code behind the tool you can make some minor changes and toss the meta
data info into SQL tables that you can then use to build an actual
cube. The meta data is easily accessible via VB (A, script, etc.)
using the DSO and can be placed into a DTS package that's on a schedule
and processes your cube; so you DimInfo cube is always up to date and
has not only the the dims, but any other attribute desired....
As a side note we're using the same SQL tables to build live Cross-cube
documentation of the dimension definitions displayed via asp pages...
We've found the DSO data absolutely invaluable, spending a little time
with it can Drastically improve efficiency and made some tasks that are
manual or down right impossible (ie: renaming the data-source - not
redirecting it to another SQL DB), easy.

Byron Kirby
SC Budget & Control Board
Office of Reasech and Statistics