Working with cubes
A cube organizes data into dimensions and measures as follows:
Measures represent values that are counted or aggregated, such as costs or units of products.
Dimensions are categories, such as products, customers, or sales periods, used to aggregate measures. Dimensions can be hierarchical and contain multiple levels. For example, a region dimension can contain a region‑country‑state hierarchy. Similarly, a time dimension can contain a year‑quarter‑month-week hierarchy. Most cubes include a time dimension because, for most reports, showing measures by day, week, month, quarter, or year is essential to analyzing data.
In a cross tab, the row and column areas display the dimensions from a cube. The dimension values form the row and column headings of the cross tab. The detail area contains one or more measures from a cube, displaying the aggregate data. For example, a retail cube can contain data that supports viewing sales volume and cost of goods, which are measures, by store location, time period, and product lines, which are dimensions.