Drill-through tables
enable you to display, at query time, the unsummarized detail data
that a table cell or selected cells were summarized from. Using the
drill-through capability, you can view the specific observations from
the underlying data that make up an aggregate value. Many OLAP applications
give you the ability to select a cell or a range of cells and then
view the input data that the cell data were summarized from. Drill-through
capability enables companies to access data that is not stored on
an OLAP server and make it accessible to end users of an OLAP application.
When the OLAP server receives a request for this additional data at
query time, it automatically submits a query and retrieves the data
from a data warehouse or from an OLTP (online transaction processing)
system. In order to provide this capability, a drill-through table
must be specified for a cube.
A drill-through table
can be a view, data set, or other data file that contains data that
is used to define a cube. For you to successfully use a drill-through
table, it must have the same columns with the same attributes as the
table that the cube was loaded from. Detail data tables are most commonly
used as drill-through tables. However, if the cube was loaded from
a star schema, a view that fully joins the star schema can be used
as a drill-through table.
In the
Cube
Designer wizard, you can select a drill-through table
on the
Cube Designer – Input page.
Select a table from the Available tables list and move it to the Selected
table list.
Note: When you select a data table
for drill-through, you might need to consider user access and security
restrictions for that table. For further information, see
Security for Drill-through Tables.