Naming Entities in the OLAP Project Wizard
The OLAP Project Wizard automatically creates entities and relationships for OLAP cube objects. The OLAP Project Wizard suggests a set of entities and relationships for all
Entities are named according to the dimension, level, measure, property, or cube to which they are associated. The singular form of the object name is used for dimension, level, property, and cube entities, and the plural form is used for measures.
If two entities have the same name, the object type is added to the entity that is being created. For example, because fact entities are created last, if the cube and the fact entities have the same name, the fact entity name is <cube name> fact.
To avoid badly named entities, such as time or date (which would cause problems for the English Query engine), the entity name of any time dimension is <cube name> <dimension name>.
| OLAP object | Description of generated entity |
|---|---|
| Dimension | Entity created for dimension if the dimension has more than one level. |
| Level | Entity created for each level unless the level appears in time dimension. |
| Measure | Entity created for each measure. |
| Property | Entity created for each member property of each level. |
| Fact | Entity created for the single fact table associated with each cube. The entity name is based on the cube name. If there is a name collision in this name, then entity is <cube name> <fact>. |
Naming Sample
From the FoodMart 2000 sample database, the OLAP Project Wizard creates entities such as:
store
store country
store state
store city
sales time (Because this is a time dimension, no entities are created for its levels.)
product
product family
product department
product category
product subcategory
brand name
product name
customer
country
state
city
customer name
gender
age
income
media type (Because this dimension is one level, no entities are created for it. An entity is created for a single level in the Promotion Media dimension.)
sale (The cube name in singular form is the entity name associated with the fact table.)
unit sale
store cost
store sale
sales count
store sales net