Implementation of a data cube with measures,calculations,KPI's and many different characteristics from scratch.
- Visual Studio 2019 (works fine if you already have visual studio 2017)
- SQL Server Management Studio
- AdventureWorks 2019 (or 2017 according to the version you have downloaded for the previous 2)
The data cube is used to represent data (sometimes called facts) along some measure of interest. For example, in OLAP such measures could be the subsidiaries a company has, the products the company offers, and time; in this setup, a fact would be a sales event where a particular product has been sold in a particular subsidiary at a particular time. In satellite image timeseries measures would be Latitude and Longitude coordinates and time; a fact would be a pixel at a given space/time coordinate as taken by the satellite (following some processing that is not of concern here). Even though it is called a cube (and the examples provided above happen to be 3-dimensional for brevity), a data cube generally is a multi-dimensional concept which can be 1-dimensional, 2-dimensional, 3-dimensional, or higher-dimensional. In any case, every dimension represents a separate measure whereas the cells in the cube represent the facts of interest. Sometimes cubes hold only few values with the rest being empty, i.e.: undefined, sometimes most or all cube coordinates hold a cell value. In the first case such data are called sparse, in the second case they are called dense, although there is no hard delineation between both.
Here I preesnt you with the solution of a basic cube made with facts from the AdventureWorks database of Microsoft where I have created all the features described in the above textfiles. Finally I composed a descriptive guide on how to setup all the needed tools to get you started on creating your own datacube.
!! Remember to change in each file the datasource connectivity information with yours. In some of the files I have written a message to indicate what you have to change.!!
~$ git clone https://github.com/AristiPap/Data-Cube
The links to download the previous prerequisities:
> Visual Studio
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/
>SQL Server and SQL Server Management Studio
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-downloads
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/ssms/download-sql-server-management-studio-ssms?view=sql-server-ver15
> AdventureWorks
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/samples/adventureworks-install-configure?view=sql-server-ver15&tabs=ssms