Improving Cube Performance with Precalculated Aggregations

Introduction

Having seen a number of Microsoft Business Intelligence implementations, I have noticed that surprisingly few use precalculated closing balances and semi-additive measures in SQL Server. I think this may be partly because of a lack of good examples available, and therefore decided to write about this issue.

This article is mainly divided in the following sections:

1. Background describing a simple example of closing balances
2. Description of our example data - a Balance Sheet
3. Step by step how to precalculate closing balances and build a cube for our Balance Sheet
4. Test results and conclusion

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