The preceding section included the creation of the first Dimension (Measures dimension). The Measures dimension contains the Fact Data that you want to analyze, report on, use for budgeting, etc.
You will want to add further Dimensions to your Cube from underlying tables in the source relational database. These may be tables of items that have been ordered or have a unit price, or are in some way described by the Measures dimension. As a simple example, working with the sample database in the preceding steps, you brought over Quantity and Unit Price as Members of the Measures dimension. What, in this database, are you likely to know the quantity of? How about Products? And since this will ultimately be a Order Information cube, you would want to know the quantity of products ordered by your customers—thus, you would also want a Customers dimension in the Cube. These are the questions you will logically want to consider in the creation of your PowerOLAP cube.
We will proceed with this example database, adding other Dimensions—Products (shown in the following steps) and then Customers.
To add the 2nd dimension (Customers dimension) simply do the following:
1. Click Add in the Dimensions
dialog box.
Again the Select Dimensions dialog appears.
2. With the New Dimension radio
button selected,
click Next in the Select Dimension dialog box to proceed
to the Define Links dialog box.
Note the slight difference in the Select Dimension dialog box, as shown in the following figure.
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There now appears a radio button for New Dimension (whereas during the creation of our first Dimension–Measures, this was actually a Measure Dimension radio button.), which is the default selection (boxed). Notice too, the radio button beside it—for Shared Dimension. This radio button appeared as an option, too, when you began creating the Measures dimension. A "Shared Dimension" is a Dimension that has already been defined using OLAP Exchange® when building a Cube, but which you now want to use in creating another Cube.
Important
For example, if you create a Order Information cube using Customers
as a Dimension—which
is shown in the following steps—and,
later, you want to create an Accounts Receivable cube which also
uses Customers as a Dimension from the same relational source database,
you would click Shared Dimension when creating Customers for the
second (etc.) Cube.
The topic on the creation of the 2nd dimension includes definition of additional attributes such as defining members, aliases, properties and hierarchy which will be covered in the succeeding topics.
Please continue with the following topics to complete creation of the 2nd dimension, which in this case is the Products dimension: