I mentioned this thread from the microsoft.public.sqlserver.olap ng on ‘Limitations of AS2005’ the other day, and it looks like it has pretty much finished. It turned into an interesting discussion on drillthrough in AS2005. Something I hadn’t realised was that in AS2005 any values you wish to see returned by drillthrough must already be defined in the cube – which, when you consider how you use drillthrough in AS2K seems a bit bizarre. However if you read the thread you’ll see what Mosha and Deepak have say on the subject, namely that for fields you only want to access via drillthrough you should create a hidden, ROLAP Fact dimension. It should be hidden because it probably wouldn’t make any sense at all to your users if they saw it, and it should be ROLAP so that it has no impact on the performance of the rest of your cube until it is queried in the drillthrough. Certainly a different way of handling the issue compared to AS2K, maybe not as intuitive and maybe it will take a little bit longer to set up, but to me quite an elegant way of solving the problem. It also fits in well with the thinking that the UDM should model everything in your data warehouse that you want to query on.
Drillthrough in AS2005
