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 cube-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.
About this task
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.
In Excel, right-click a cell in a PivotTable report and select Additional Options for access to Drill-Through options. You cannot use Show Details for Drill-Through.
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Attention: Drill-Through Sets require at least one measure to be able to save the definition. If upgrading to AtScale version 2020.2.0 and later, when opening models which contain Drill-Through definitions without a measure AtScale will display an error prompting the user to add at least one measure.
Procedure
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Open the Cube Designer canvas for the cube.
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Click the Drill Throughs icon to open the Drill Throughs panel.
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From the Drill Throughs panel menu, select Add Drill Through. The Create Drillthrough dialog opens.
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Enter a descriptive name for the Drill-Through Set. The name will help users decide what set of attributes they want to see (if there are multiple Drill-Throughs defined on the cube).
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From the Attributes pane, select the dimension and measure attributes you want to see in your Drill-Through query results.
When you select an attribute, it appears in the Enabled Attributes pane on the right. Use this list to confirm your selections. Click the X beside a dimension attribute (teal) or measure attribute (orange) name to remove it.
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Click Save. The new Drill-Through Set appears in the Drill Throughs panel.