Cognos measure allocation / scope in MSAS

I am a Cognos developer (10 years) and am frustrated with the apparent lack of MSAS ability to replicate Cognos measure scope / allocation features.

I have built three cubes, Sales Info, Store Count, and Date Count and wrapped these into a virtual cube (Sales Reporting). Both the Store Count and Date Count cubes have just a single dimension and a single measure each (Distinct counts of Stores and of Days respectively), this is my attempt at replicating the use of several fact queries with differing scope in Cognos Transformer. In my virtual cube I wish the distinct counts to be allocated constantly within dimensions that are out of scope. For instance if I have product categories as rows and my measures as columns then I wish to see the total number of stores on each row and the number of days in the date range so that I can calculate a few ratio's. I do not wish to see the number of stores that sold products in each category or the number of days products in that category were sold, which is what I see if I use distinct count measures in a cube with the exact same dimensionality.


All that I have been able to achieve is something similar to Cognos's 'do not allocate', zero's appear down the list of categories in out of scope dimensions.

TIA

You will need to create a calculated membert to do this with MSAS 2000. Yukon may give you what you are after but it ain't going to be production for a while yet

I have now resolved this issue thanks to a tip posted on another forum. As with all things in I.T. it's easy once you know how. My basic problem really is not knowing the translation of Cognos terms into Analysis Services terms.

The solution is to set up the two seperate cubes and create a virtual cube with the required combined measures and dimensions as I had done. Then in the virtual cube create a calculated member with the 'ValidMeasure' function. So in my case
ValidMember(Store Count) I Named this measure as 'Store Count - Constant'
and ValidMember(Date Count) I Named this measure as 'Date Count - Constant'

The constant tag in the label lets me know that the measure will be allocated constantly to dimension categories of dimensions not contained in the original sorce cube.

Within my cube I am now able to calculate average daily sales per store for all levels and categories of the items dimension.

I am a novice with Cognos Transformer. In following your discussion on distinct count problem, I'd like your advices on the distinct category count issue I am having. I have created a very simple cube with a category count measure inserted for Invoice ID counts. I made sure that the property value is set to Unique for the lowest level of the Invoice dimension - Invoice ID. Then the new measure Invoice Count was created by defining it as category count type for all measures. However, the count is not presenting the right number as it is shown in the transformer's show counts for the level. What is it missing to make the category count working right? Thanks for your help.

Hi:

Check out the Knowledgebase on www.cognos.com, or the IT-ToolBox forum for Cognos, for the solution to your Cognos Transformer question. This group is for MSSQL Server 2000 Analysis Services and MDX Topics.

Best of Luck!

Bill