Who will add rows in fact table of Mondrian? Developer or Mondrian itself?

Question

I want to ask very very basic question related to Mondrian. I have created one fact table to build Mondrian cube. Currently that fact table does not contain any rows. So, I would like to know Who will add rows in fact table of Mondrian? Developer or Mondrian itself?

Answer 1

The developer.

Mondrian is, roughly speaking, simply an engine that takes MDX queries and translates them into SQL queries.

More to the point, typically you'll have a database that serves as data warehouse (where you have your Mondrian cubes) and an operational database (or several), where the actual data is coming from. Though you declared the cube in a cubename.mondrian.xml file, you have given no indications to Mondrian on what the operational database looks like (it might not even look like a database -- we maintain several cubes populated from Apache logs!)

Since it's your responsibility as the developer to populate the cube, in the Pentaho world we usually use Pentaho Data Integration (also known as Kettle) as our ETL tool (which is to say, it's the tool we use to Extract data from whatever sources, Transform it into a shape more useful for our purposes, and Load it into the data warehouse)