Introduction

In every BI project, we find dimensions and facts. There is an extensive literature about data modeling if you want to look further into this topic; I personally like The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling by Ralph Kimball and Margy Ross; a very complete, yet simple-to-read manual.

We learned in the previous chapter that the metadata components that represent the physical structure of the database are called schema objects. In this type of objects, we find tables, facts, attributes, hierarchies, and others. We can use schema objects to build more complex elements such as metrics or filters, to name a few.

Every time we create or make a change to a schema object we need to notify MicroStrategy so that it can reload the information from the metadata. This process is called schema update (Schema | Update Schema or press Ctrl + U).

In this chapter, we will concentrate on what is generally known as dimension, and—in MicroStrategy vocabulary—is named...