Intelligent Cubes: An Intelligent Cube is a set of data that can be shared as a single in-memory copy, among many different reports created by multiple users. Rather than returning data from the data warehouse for a single report,
you can return sets of data from your data warehouse and save them directly to Intelligence Server memory. The reports accessing Intelligent Cubes can use all of the OLAP Services features for analysis and reporting purposes.
Intelligent Cubes are created and published for use as a shared data source for the users to build reports from. Intelligent Cubes provide the fast response time and analytic calculations that are often associated with Multidimensional Online Analytic Processing (MOLAP) cubes, while also benefiting from the ability to use Relational Online Analytic Processing (ROLAP) by drilling into the full set of data outside of the Intelligent Cube. In addition, Intelligent Cubes are fully scalable, limiting excessive data consumption and redundant data by allowing you to build only the sets of data you require.
An intelligent cube is made up of two files – an info file (contains the structure of the cube) and a data file. Each one of them has a representation in memory and indicates different things:
- When the data file is not updated with its representation from memory, the cube’s “dirty status flag” is set to true.
- When the info file is different from its representation in memory, then the cube’s “monitoring information dirty status flag” is set to true.
While (1) indicates that the data of the cube is incorrect (2) indicates that the cube’s monitoring information is different on disk than it is in memory.
The following section discusses an example of the workflow and status change for MicroStrategy 9.x Intelligent Cube:
P = Processing, A = Active, L = Loaded, D = Dirty, F = Filed, M = Monitoring Information Dirty
Coming soon on dynamic cube usage