Using a utility dimension to implement flexible display units
Measures are sometimes too precise for reporting needs. Either because they have decimals which distract us or because the numbers are very large, consisting of many digits, and therefore hard to memorize or compare with others. The phrase can't see the forest for the trees fits perfectly here.
Sometimes users like to see measures displayed in thousands or millions for ease of comparison. One way to accomplish that would be to divide those measures directly in the fact table by, let's say 1,000 or 1,000,000. We would of course have to specify the new unit in the title of the measure. However, that wouldn't be a good solution. In situations where we need the results to be as precise as possible, that would cause problems. As said, sometimes, but not always, there's a need to simplify the numbers.
The other way would be to generate a set of parallel calculated measures, one for each factor. That way we would have sales amount, then...
