Design Question Again.

Hi,
I am a newbie and I have been studying DW for a while and I've
successfully built some cubes.
There is still one thing I am not sure how to design it in the fact table
which is the COUNT. Let's say I have an Order Fact to record the order from
customers. Then I have OrderDate, ShipDate, CancelDate, PickupDate, and some
sales related measurments. How do I count how many orders were cancelled (I
stored -1 as a value) for CancelDate? Should I add an measurment column that
put a value of 1 if the order was cancelled and put 0 if the order was not
cancelled so that it can be aggregated in the cube? I need the same thing to
count the pickup since some customers pick up in the store not ship out and I
need to be able to generate the comparison between ShipOut, Pickup, and
Cancel.

Thanks so much

Ed

Hi Ed,
I think that you can add either add a column to your fact table or not. The
reason is that if you do not want to add it to your fact table, you can
create a view that combines your fact table and an additional column for
cancel status in your data warehouse. After that you can use it as the fact
table in your cube. This should be easily implemented in T-SQL statement.
You can also applies this method to your other requirements on ShipOut,
Pickup and Cancel. If you use ROLAP, the query performance may be slower
than putting them into one fact table. If you use MOLAP, the performance
impact can be ignored.

Hope this helps. Please feel free to let me know if you have any other
questions or concerns.

Have a nice day!

Best regards,
Charles Wang
Microsoft Online Community Support
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"Ed" wrote in message

> Hi,
> I am a newbie and I have been studying DW for a while and I've
> successfully built some cubes.
> There is still one thing I am not sure how to design it in the fact table
> which is the COUNT. Let's say I have an Order Fact to record the order
> from
> customers. Then I have OrderDate, ShipDate, CancelDate, PickupDate, and
> some
> sales related measurments. How do I count how many orders were cancelled
> (I
> stored -1 as a value) for CancelDate? Should I add an measurment column
> that
> put a value of 1 if the order was cancelled and put 0 if the order was not
> cancelled so that it can be aggregated in the cube? I need the same thing
> to
> count the pickup since some customers pick up in the store not ship out
> and I
> need to be able to generate the comparison between ShipOut, Pickup, and
> Cancel.
>
> Thanks so much
>
> Ed
>