Cube Attributes

[Eric]

Anyone ever use Cube attributes? I just saww you can have then, but cannot think of a good reason to use then.

[Mike Cowie]

Hi Eric,

About the only time I've used them is to add descriptions to cubes, but that isn't incredibly useful unless someone has the Properties pane of the Server Explorer open. And even then it isn't in the most helpful-to-read format. Otherwise, I suppose they're just something you can use in Excel/TI if needed. I know there are some other built-in attributes like Measures & Time dimension (theoretically useful with MDX, but I've never tested to see if there's much support behind that) as well as load on demand option (which I've also not used).

Regards,

[ScottW]

In setups where memory is at a premium and users don't want to delete/archive seldom used historical data load on demand can be very useful and I have used it often in the past, however in a 64 bit world this is redundant.

[PXB]

I used them, and dimension and element attributes as well, as an optional alias for an Excel-based product I developed called Driller. It read the current cell 'address' and constructed a default SQL drillthrough query using any cube, dimension and element attributes called 'Driller' that existed. If they did not exist then the actual object name would be used in the query (e.g. select * from 98sales where product='4WD Saloons' and month='Jan') but if any of those Driller attributes existed it would use those automatically instead (e.g. select * from vFactSales1998 where nkProduct = 'SKU82348' and nkPeriod = 'P01'). Either way the query was editable before execution commenced and templates could be used but it still helped a lot to kind of reverse-map back to the DW/staging area without any manual intervention needed.

[Eric]

Thanks everyone!