Background
You are the business intelligence (BI) solutions architect for Contoso Ltd, a multinational sales company with offices in London, Madrid, Paris, Brisbane, Tokyo, and New York. Contoso sells office consumable products such as pens, printer ink, and paper.
You produce solutions by using SQL Server 2012 Business Intelligence Edition and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition with SP1.
Technical Background
Contoso’s products are categorized by using four levels while some use only two or three levels. Products are categorized as shown in the following table.
Contoso sells products through mobile sales staff, direct marketing, and its website. Sales personnel are located in various regions around the world, and each region has a sales manager who is paid a quarterly bonus based on the total sales in the region during the quarter. Regions are categorized as shown in the following table.
SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) is used to host a multidimensional database. The database contains a single cube named Sales and three database dimensions named Products, Regions, and Date. A single measure named Sales Total has been defined in the cube. The data source for the database is a SQL Server data warehouse.
The Products dimension contains a single user-defined hierarchy named Products. To prevent the display of empty members when users browse the Products dimension, the Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) process populates all missing values as shown in the following diagram.
The structure of the Products hierarchy is shown in the following diagram.
The Regions dimension contains a single user-defined hierarchy named Sales Regions. The dimension is based on a single dimension table in the data warehouse and the attribute relationships have not been modified since the dimension was created by using the Dimension wizard. The structure of the Sales Regions hierarchy is shown in the following diagram.
The Date dimension contains a single user-defined hierarchy named Calendar. The structure of the Calendar hierarchy is shown in the following diagram.
A role named UserRegions has been created in the SSAS database that will be used to filter members in the Regions dimension based on the authenticated user.
Administrative staff from around the world will produce sales reports with Microsoft Excel 2010 based on the Sales cube.
Developers will produce reports with SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) based on the Sales cube and the reports will be delivered to users through report subscriptions and a web browser-All users log on to an Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) domain named contoso.com. All client computers and servers are joined to the contoso.com domain.
Business Requirements
The BI system must meet the following reporting requirements:
Display all sales figures in euro currency, regardless of the client’s reporting location
Include a new measure named AD Sales that calculates average daily sales for a selected month
Support near real-time reporting while maintaining good performance for multidimensional queries
Support reports that show currency exchange rates
Deliver executive reports that are parameterized and rendered from report snapshots
In addition, cube objects must use terms familiar to users from around the world. For example, in the SalesRegions hierarchy, users from Great Britain must see the State level presented as County when browsing the Sales cube.
The Sales cube must support a new measure group named Sales Planning. The measure group must consist of a single measure named Sales Plan that enables the management team to use Excel 2010 to enter sales plans for future monitoring.
The BI system must meet the following technical requirements:
Architecture requirements
The system must use separate servers for each of the following components:
-SQL Server Database Engine
-SQL Server Integration Services
-SQL Server Analysis Services in multidimensional mode
-SharePoint Server with the Reporting Services Add-in All servers must be installed using U.S. regional settings.
The system must source currency exchange rate data from a database hosted in Microsoft Azure SQL Database.
Security requirements
When possible, the system must use Windows authentication for all database connections. The system must prevent users from querying data from outside of their region. The system must allow certain users to query data from multiple regions.
Development requirements
When browsing the Products hierarchy, repeating values for different levels of a given drill-path must be avoided. For example, Papers -> Copy Paper -> Copy
Paper -> Copy Paper should appear simply as Papers -> Copy Paper.
The system must support report snapshots. The default maximum number of retained snapshots must not exceed five.
A.
