Session 2: Modeling Your Business Data
Lesson 4 – Creating Dimensions

Now that you’ve completed the first session, understand what OLAP is including the concepts behind it, and feel confident that you understand terms like “dimension” and “element”, you’re ready for the next steps: creating a model for your business data. As covered in the previous lesson, you should now have used the Modeler to create a database, with optionally adding internationalization. Now you’re ready to take your theoretical data model, where you identified how many dimensions you need, what elements should be placed in each dimension, the hierarchical structure of the elements within a dimension, and make it a reality.

This lesson covers how to create a static dimension manually where you type in the element information and set up the hierarchy. The following lessons will go into setting up dimensions from other sources, such as importing them and a great new feature as of Jedox 7: the time editor for setting up your time dimension. Note: This is shown in a simplified manner in this session to foster your understanding of how the Jedox system is set up and functions so that you’re properly prepared for bigger challenges later – in-depth integration using extract, transform, load (ETL) processes is handled in a later session. Setting up attributes and automatic translations, called internationalization (another new feature as of Jedox 7), is covered here as well. When your dimensions have been set up, you can move on to creating a cube, which is where your data will be stored. Best practices are also brought up whenever appropriate.

Get familiar with Jedox as a platform by watching our Platform Basics course, where you can learn how to create ad-hoc reports, customized reports, and set up data models among other things. Check out the Jedox Blog for some great practical examples and our user documentation resource at the Jedox Knowledge Base.