All You Need To Know To Start Learning SQL Server Analysis Services

I have this rare opportunity to provide basic SSAS training to developers from another team. Being busy with my own projects, my manager and their manager agreed to have the training for only 3 hours. I met the would be trainees and their manager to understand their expectations, the developer profiles and the modeling technique their project use.

The developers have intermediate to advanced T-SQL skills and they expect that at the end of the 3-hour training, they would be able to comfortably navigate around the existing SSAS solution, understand basic concepts of dimensional modeling, create new dimensions and measures, modify the existing cubes and have the basic knowledge they need to dig deeper into SSAS themselves. Whew! Investigating further, I found their current solution uses multidimensional approach with SQL Server 2012. They have calculations and perspectives but do not (or maybe not yet) define partitions, aggregations and translations.

With those constraints in mind, I prepared the outline of my training using XMind.

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[SSIS] Lookup Transformation – Full Cache option

Level: Intermediate

Lookup transformation is an essential ingredient of a Data Flow task accessing multiple database servers. I always use the Full Cache option when the reference table is small enough to be stored in memory. However, this caching option needs more than setting up your Lookup task to work. Here are few things to check when your Lookup transformation fails to detect a match you are expecting it to detect:

Case sensitivity – the columns being compared must have exactly the same case. Otherwise, the match will fail.

Solution: Use UPPER() OR LOWER() on BOTH the Lookup AND the pipeline columns

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