The primary aim of Microsoft was to ease the process of building and using data warehouses. A large number of wizards, editors and tools have been built into the Analysis services to fulfill this objective. The wizards available for use are: The Cube wizard that helps the user build all the structures necessary to create an OLAP cube. It walks the user through the entire cube design and implementation process. The user can map the data sources, create dimensions and define measures using this wizard. The Cube Editor is useful in editing cube structures or in creating new cubes. The simple drag and drop feature makes the operation very easy. It complements the cube wizard and can be used to edit the cubes created in the Cube wizard.

The Dimension Wizard is used to create shared dimensions that can be used by cubes across the data warehouse or a private dimension to be used by a single cube. Data base dimension tables can be mapped to dimension levels and the built in time dimension generator can be used to create a variety of time dimensions based on a date time column in the database. The dimension wizard can also be used to create a star or snowflake schema in the data warehouse. Parent child, virtual or data mining dimensions can be created with ease. The Dimension Editor complements the Dimension wizard and can be used to edit existing dimensions or create new ones. The dimensions can be previewed in the Dimension editor.

The Incremental Update Wizard guides the user through the process of incorporating new data into the cube. This can be done without reloading the aggregations or reloading all data.

The Partition Wizard is used to create partitions in a cube and enable the user distribute and optimize the cube’s data into discrete segments on a single server or on multiple servers. Multiple partition creation is a feature available only in the Enterprise edition of SQL Server 2000. The partition wizard appears when the cube folder is right clicked and partitions >new partitions is selected.

The Storage Design Wizard specifies the storage mode of the cube. Users can design aggregations that are appropriate to the intended use of the cube. The option inbuilt into this wizard enables a tradeoff between response time and storage requirements according to the needs of the application.

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