Multidimensional Diagrams

A multidimensional data diagram provides a graphical view of your datamart or data warehouse database, and helps you identify the facts and dimensions that will be used to build its cubes.

Note Multi-dimensional diagrams are generally generated from a physical diagram (see Generating Cubes). To manually create a multidimensional diagram in an existing PDM, right-click the model in the Browser and select  New  Multidimensional Diagram . To create a new model, select  File  New Model , choose Physical Data Model as the model type and Multidimensional Diagram as the first diagram, and then click OK.

Numeric values or measures such as sales total, budget, and cost, are the facts of the business, while the areas covered by the business, in terms of geography, time, people and products, are the dimensions of the business. A multidimensional diagram shows the facts, surrounded by their dimensions, which will be used to populate cubes for enterprise information management, query and analysis tool and enterprise reporting. In the following example, the Sales fact is surrounded by the Product, Time, Customer, and Store dimensions to allow sales data to be analyzed by any of these criteria:

PowerDesigner maps facts and dimensions to their original operational database tables to enable population of the cubes (see Operational to Warehouse Data Mappings).