Insert Transactional Data to Cube

Question

I am new to the data warehouse and currently working on this project. Is there any way to insert new data transactional to existing cube? With tools or with MDX query maybe?

Answer 1

MDX is usually just a read-only language.

With an OLAP cube you have two options to change the data:

• UPDATE/INSERT to the underlying SQL data mart yourself, and then rebuild the cube
• Use something called WRITEBACK where you set numbers directly in the cube, and it decides how to save these back to the data mart (which is tricky if you set a number at the top level, and it has to decide how to split that value up between all the members down to the bottom level)

Answer 2

Usually there is an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool like Pentaho (open source) or Informatica which populates a data warehouse. The data warehouse itself may use a proper database and a product like Mondrian is used to hold data in cubes.Jasper Server, for example has mondrian packaged with it. Data from transactional system is populated in the data warehouse, then the cube is 'refreshed'. There may be other possible approaches.