SSAS Interview Questions 3

Data Warehouse

[SSAS]

Questions:

Notes:

What is Conditional Formatting?

They allow us to add custom formatting to our measures based upon certain conditions.

For example, we can format a Net Sales measure to be green if it is positive (income) or red if it is negative (loss).

What are Perspectives?

That’s why we have Perspectives which limit the data which can be seen in the Cube viewer. We can specify perspectives to only show specific data measures or dimension attributes.

By doing so we can clean up the Cube viewer to only show data which is most important to the users using it.

What are the 3 types of Storages Modes for Cubes?

1. MOLAP
   1. Where cube data is physically stored in the partition files of the Cube. Aggregations can then be done on the data within the cube. This requires us to process the data and physically load it into our cube.
2. HOLAP
   1. Where cube data is not stored in the cube but instead read from the relational database.  Aggregations, however, are stored in the cube itself. This requires the relational database to be running so the cube can connect.
3. ROLAP
   1. Where cube data is not stored in the cube like HOLAP. All data, including Aggregations, are read from the relational database. SSAS physically stores the aggregation data in the relational database. Then the dimension, fact, and aggregation data are all read from the relational database.