SAS OLAP Cubes: Tips for Building OLAP Cube Aggregations Effectively

  As promised, this is a guest post by Steve Overton, who was one of the external reviewers on the Building Business Intelligence with SAS.  Steve works as a SAS BI consultant in the Raleigh-Durham, NC area and is sharing some of his SAS OLAP Cube wizardry with us today! Building OLAP Cube Aggregations Effectively Let me start by saying that I follow a general practice of building cubes by writing the code directly in a SAS program rather than relying solely on SAS OLAP Cube Studio.  Tip #1: Use SAS OLAP Cube Studio for Skeleton Code A good technique I’ve learned is to start building the cube in SAS OLAP Cube Studio to get the skeleton code written for you.  Then proceed with additional dimensions, measures, and customizations by enhancing the SAS code directly.   Once you have a few cubes built, it is also just as easy to copy the OLAP code from one program to the next! Tip #2: Use Separate Steps for OLAP Cube Aggregations Aggregations in OLAP cubes are used to improve the response time of a cube.  By default, aggregations are defined along with the cube in one giant PROC OLAP step.  One critical technique […]

Clearning up the sqldf confusion

Apparently I have issues with my reading comprehension and with Textmate (initially) when it comes to using the sqldf package. G. pointed out in the previous comments, I could have just used options(gsubfn.engine = “R”) instead of going through the trouble of installing the tcltk binaries. If you’ve got a happy distribution of R that […]

Example 9.16: Small multiples

Small multiples are one of the great ideas of graphics visionary Edward Tufte (e.g., in Envisioning Information). Briefly, the idea is that if many variations on a theme are presented, differences quickly become apparent. Today we offer general guida…

Example 9.16: Small multiples

Small multiples are one of the great ideas of graphics visionary Edward Tufte (e.g., in Envisioning Information). Briefly, the idea is that if many variations on a theme are presented, differences quickly become apparent. Today we offer general guida…

NOTE: Testing (Collating the Results)

We began this series of posts on testing with an introduction to testing disciplines, and I followed that with a description of how we could quickly create some small macros that would allow us to automate some of our testing and present the …

NOTE: Testing (Collating the Results)

We began this series of posts on testing with an introduction to testing disciplines, and I followed that with a description of how we could quickly create some small macros that would allow us to automate some of our testing and present the …