Greetings, programs!

After Venkat just recently wrote about one task usually done after a cube import – namely the setup of the time dimensions – I’d like to continue a bit on this topic.

One thing that gets many people and can lead to raised eyebrows (in a questionable fashion) is the way, the dimension objects are built in the business model when dragging a cube over.

The blue’s a dead giveaway that something changes as of Gen3. Let’s look at the keys for the lowest level.

And in detail:

“Gen8,Department#1” only has Gen8,Department as key column.

To see how this behaves if we do nothing, we create a request. Just Gen7,Department, constrained to a specific member.

Results

Drill

I’d call that “suboptimal”…so back to the rpd. Kill the multi-column key. Keep the other and rename it (yes, I’m pedantic with stuff like that). Do the same on all other levels.

Back to our report and let’s look at the results now:

Much better. Depending on how your cubes are built, don’t forget to ensure that the option “Use unqualified member name for performance” is unchecked.

End of line.