SSAS 2008-Perspectives

When creating a cube in SSAS with the fact and dimension tables, it is possible that the Measures in the cube could belong to different parts of business. To elaborate on this , it is possible that the Cube could have Sales related measures, Customer related measures and Product related measures. When the cube is deployed and is being viewed by business users, it is possible that certain business users would like to focus on the measures to their business area. In order to achieve instead of having cubes split into smaller cubes based on business function, there is a feature called Perspectives available in SSAS 2008. Once the cube has been created and related dimensions have been added, the different perspectives can be created. In the screen shot below, the Perspectives tab is highlighted (this is in BIDS/Visual Studio 2008).

In the Perspectives, initially one gets to see the default perspective which is a view of the whole cube with all the measures and all the dimensions. In order to create a new Perspective, one has to click the New Perspective icon nest to the process icon in the toolbar.

First name the new perspective and start working downwards to start choosing/Checking the Measures needed to be shown for this perspective, likewise do the same for the dimensions.

Once this is completed and the cube is processed, the cube data can be viewed in the Browser tab. In the Browser tab one can choose the different perspectives from the Perspectives dropdown and change the data being viewed. Perspective, I think is a neat way to get different views of data in the cube without physically splitting the cube.