Defining Drill-Through Sets

Some XMLA compliant BI tools, such as Microsoft Excel, allow you to select a cell in a visualization and request a model-side Drill-Through Set to see detailed information about the cell. The Drill-Through Set allows you to determine the specific level of detail to return for these queries.

Drill-Through Sets can be used as a design alternative to solve performance problems associated with large pivot tables that request many fine-grained model attributes such as Customer Name, Email, and Mailing Address. Requesting such fine-grained attributes at the top-level of a pivot table creates a very complicated cross-product query that can generate many expensive out-bound queries. Performance is dramatically improved by moving fine-grained attributes from a Pivot Table to a Drill-Through Set because the calculations are only performed for a specific cell when requested by a user.

Note: SQL-based BI Tools, such as Tableau, do not support AtScale Drill-Through Sets. It is recommended that Tableau Dashboard Designers use Tableau Actions to expose detailed information about an aggregated cell or mark.

To access Drill-Through options in Excel, right-click a cell in a PivotTable report and select Additional Options. You cannot use Show Details for Drill-Through.

Defining drill-throughs in AtScale

A Drill-Through is a selection of dimension and measure attributes to show for Drill-Through queries issued by business intelligence (BI) tools. For performance reasons, it is recommended that Drill-Through Sets do not exceed 20 attributes.

You can define drill-throughs for your AtScale models using the Semantic Modeling Language - specifically, the drillthroughs property in model files. For more information, see the AtScale SML Object Documentation on GitHub.