Working with cubes

For the most part, Tableau behavior is uniform across data sources. For example, the experience of working with an Access database and an Oracle database is very similar. Of course, different data sources will have different nuances but, in general, Tableau attempts to make working with different data sources a seamless experience. However, working with cubes (that is, multidimensional data sources) is quite different. Major differences include the inability to alias, create calculated fields on dimensions, create groups or hierarchies, change aggregation types, generate extracts, and more. Tableau knowledge base articles provide many workarounds for these shortcomings.

Note

At the time of writing, the central cube-related article is located at http://kb.tableau.com/articles/knowledgebase/functional-differences-olap-relational.

This article provides detailed information and is well-worth studying in detail if you work with cubes. Provided with the article is a .twbx file...