Introduction
A crucial part of report design is determining what the appropriate level of information will be presented to the business users. The appropriate level of information must be carefully matched to any business requirements, with maximized benefit to the business and minimum performance impact.
Every analytical reporting project has different requirements. In this chapter, we are going to focus on techniques that you can employ in your project to make analytical reports more compact and more concise, and therefore more efficient.
Recipes in this chapter can be implemented in pivot tables, the analytical component found in any SSAS frontend in one form or another. SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) report developers will also find these recipes very useful since they can implement these methods directly in an SSRS report.
The problem with pivot table-style reports is that they tend to grow very large very quickly. Including several hierarchies on rows, and some on columns, will...
