In SQL Server Analysis Services 2005, you can create "perspectives" on cubes. What a perspective can do, is allow you hide different dimensions, measure groups and attributes. This works great but I still think there are a few things that are missing.
The first thing is that the cube itself is a perspective, one that is always there and you cannot hide. In a scenario where you want to build a cube but then have multiple perspectives, but you don’t want end user clients to see the main cube, or use the main perspective, you can’t do it, or at least I cannot find a way to do it. 🙂
The second thing is, which really is more to do with linked objects, is that when you link in a dimension, for instance, you cannot hide or show attributes, you are stuck with what is in the main dimension in your source cube. So what do you do? Use a perspective. But if SSAS let you hide attributes, etc on the dimension, it would let you forgo the use of perspectives.
The third thing is just security in general. You cannot secure a perspective. If you want Accounting to see XYZ perspective, and HR to see ABC perspective, but you don’t want them to see each other’s perspectives, you are out of luck, and need to come up with a new solution, which probably involves crazy security in your cube, or creating new cubes that link in dimensions and measure groups from the main cube.
Don’t get me wrong, SSAS 2005 is a vast improvement over SSAS 2000, but there are just a few things that I feel are missing, or , I might not know about how to enable some of the things I want to do. 🙂 I know SSAS 2008 has more improvements and that will be a good change, hopefully there are some cool things that let you manage your cubes and perspectives a little better.
Steve Novoselac's Blog 
7 replies on “SSAS 2005: Cube Perspectives Are Good, But Something Is Missing…”
Just passing and thought I would tell you how to hide the cube
“In a scenario where you want to build a cube but then have multiple perspectives, but you don’t want end user clients to see the main cube, or use the main perspective, you can’t do it, or at least I cannot find a way to do it.”
Go to the perspective tab, click on the cube name, under cube objects, look at the properties, Visible = False should get rid of it.
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nice…!
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Visible = False for the cube object on the perspectives tab does NOT work, i.e. hide the cube or the perspective.
“Should” does not mean that Microsoft has finished implementing it or that it works.
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I was just passing through as well, I can confirm that it works for hiding cubes from other products such as Performance Point.
Selecting Visible to false for the main cube hid the main cube and allowed only the ability to choose from the unhidden perspectives for my data source, however this had an unexpected behavior for my dashboards. The filters were unable to retrieve the necessary data! I looked on the event log of the server which told me that the main cube was not found. I pointed the filters to use the perspective as it’s data source so I do not understand why this error was being returned. I guess the filter could not navigate to the data since the main cube was hidden although the reports showed the data as expected. Maybe it’s a limitation of the filters in Performance Point.
In any case, I set the main cube back to visible and the filters began working again.
FYI – I have service Pack two installed for SSAS.
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So it sounds like the cube itself hiden will crash the dashboard, isn’t it? Anyway, I have found if the attribues in cube have been hiden, the SSRS will not work any more. Is there anyone knows about that? I am damn confused with that. And this issue costed me quite a lot of time to tune.:((((
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Nice one Matt, just doing my SSAS 2005 course and the instructor was wondering whether 2008 would have security enabled. He says “…scary…”
🙂
Max
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Thx.. the info provided helped me to understand what Perspective is…
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