In this article, we will build a cube to meet some illustrative business requirements of a hypothetical corporate financial reporting function. We will expand upon many of the concepts we introduced in earlier lessons, and then we will discuss some of the challenges that accompany cube design for financial reporting.

In this article, Part I of a two part series, we:

• Create a core financial cube, focusing on the expense side, and based upon the expense fact table provided within the FoodMart 2000 sample database;
•  Discuss some of the realities of multiple fact tables in data sources that we often encounter in the business environment;
• Explore some of the realities that accompany cube design for financial reporting.

We will develop our initial core further in Part II of this lesson, then we will populate our model with the Revenue / Sales elements of a simple Income Statement, after discussing the options we have available within Analysis Services for doing so.

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About the Series:

This article is a member of the series Introduction to MSSQL Server 2000 Analysis Services. The series is designed to provide hands-on application of the fundamentals of MS SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services, with each installment progressively adding features and techniques designed to meet specific real - world needs. For more information on the series, as well as the hardware / software requirements to prepare for the exercises we will undertake, please see my initial article, Creating Our First Cube.

Analysis Services, Financial Reporting, Profit and Loss, Calculated Members, Income Statement, Rollup Analysis Services, Financial Reporting, Profit and Loss, Calculated Members, Income Statement, Rollup, Aggregation, Sign Control, Footnote, Format, Sales, Revenue, UNION ALL, Virtual, Custom Members, Data Type

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