Sunday, August 17, 2008

There is one tiny new feature in SSAS 2008 that you can easily miss. It called Empty Cube. When you create a new cube using the wizard, you can create an empty cube, meaning that it has no measures, dimension relationships, etc. The original use of it is for "users (who) want to create everything manually, or when all dimensions are linked dimensions" (taken from the description in the wizard)

In the past, I written about using SSAS with Visual SourceSafe in order to have source and version control for the SSAS project. I mentioned that it has many disadvantages but the big advantage (source & version control) is bigger so in the bottom line I recommend using it. One of the problems we experienced were that every time that someone creates a new object (cube, dimension, etc.) he has to check out the .dwproj file. The result is that sometimes we have a fight in the team for that file and we shouting: "who taken out the dwproj???" (yeah, I know that we can check who did it inside VSS but shouting is more fun).

The empty cube feature is a nice solution for this problem: When you create a new project you can create all the (empty) cubes and then the .dwproj file is free and no longer needed. I'm assuming that you know which cubes you'll have when starting a new project. The only thing remained is the same solution for dimensions. I'll recommend it in the Connect site (it's not working now for some reason).