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.

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

Open the Cube Designer canvas for the cube.
Click the Drill Throughs icon to open the Drill Throughs panel.
From the Drill Throughs panel menu, select Add Drill Through. The Create Drillthrough dialog opens.
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).
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.
Click Save. The new Drill-Through Set appears in the Drill Throughs panel.