Basic concepts

An InfoCube is the element of Board’s multidimensional database that allows storing and retrieving data using the multidimensional metaphor. An InfoCube has dimensions, providing different perspectives on data. The dimensions of an InfoCube are entities or hierarchies. The intersection of an InfoCube’s dimensions define the InfoCube grain, its smallest element, also referred to as the InfoCube cell.

For example, a Sales Amount InfoCube which has three dimensions Month-Product-Customer, can be viewed by any of the axes, for example total sales by Product, total sales by Month or by Customer as well as any intersection, for example sales by Product in a given Month or for a given Customer. When a dimension of an InfoCube is part of a hierarchy, the InfoCube can be viewed at any aggregation level of the hierarchy. Considering our example, sales by Quarter and Year (these are aggregations of Month) and by any aggregation of Customer (for example City and State) or of the Product entity (for example Product Group or Product Type). The user can easily build views for any possible intersection of any two or more entities of a hierarchy part of a dimension.

Board supports numeric, date and text InfoCube types.

To access the InfoCubes transaction, click the Cubes icon of the ribbon bar

 

Note that Cubes can be organized in logical groups. Groups are not part of the multidimensional model (they cannot be used in report or procedures), the only purpose of groups is to improve reading and searching through the list of Cubes.

 

When an InfoCube is created, Board creates an internal unique identifier (UID) for it. The UID is subsequently used to refer to the InfoCube. Reports, procedures, DataReader protocols and other objects all refer to UID. As a consequence, changing the InfoCube name does not affect existing Capsules (and its reports and procedures) or other database objects. There is an exception to this rule. Board Web queries use the InfoCube name to reference an InfoCube. The InfoCube name is stored in the Query script file therefore changing the name will affect existing web queries which use the InfoCube.