Performing a custom drillthrough

Multidimensional database systems like Analysis Services naturally support the top-down analysis approach. Data can be browsed using multilevel hierarchies, starting from the top level and descending down to the levels we need to. These cube data are typically aggregated at different levels.

There is another side of the story. Users occasionally want to see every single detail about an aggregated value represented in a single cell in pivot. This information originates from a series of fact tables or individual transactions in the relational database. So, we might think that if we want to see the transactions that give a certain measure, we would look for them in the relational data warehouse. However, we can find these details right inside the SSAS model itself, and we can extract these details regardless of the relational engine. The mechanism that supports this is the drillthrough.

Drillthrough can either be issued as a standalone command, or it can be predefined...