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 […]