Introduction

This chapter contains recipes for extending Analysis Services cubes with calculations, actions, and key performance indicators (KPIs). Additionally, you will learn how to customize cubes using translations, perspectives, and measure expressions.

As you learned in the previous chapters, Analysis Services cubes expose data found in relational data sources. The primary advantage of polling SSAS cubes in lieu of relational tables is the swift execution of queries achieved by the efficient data storage in the MOLAP format and precalculated summary values called aggregations. However, relational data sources might not contain all numbers helpful for business analysis. For example, you could have sales data for each broker, but the application might also need to compare the average sale amount per broker in the northern states with the respective performance of brokers in the south, east and west regions. You might also need to calculate each product's contribution to total sales per...