Introduction to Formula Basic, Cube Formulas, Dependencies & Persistent Calculations
PowerOLAP® provides extended support, through dialog features and through formula “grammar,” for arithmetic calculations, functions, and algebraic expressions. The enhanced Formula Editor has features that can be accessed by right-clicking in the dialog box. These features are explained under the topics Cube Formulas, Calculation Depth and Persistent Calculations.
In addition, PowerOLAP® allows you to write Dependencies for your formulas, greatly increasing the speed of calculations in large and sparsely populated databases. See the Dependencies topic for a more detailed explanation.
Persistent Calculation results are written to disk as opposed to existing solely in RAM, and provide a speed enhancement because these formulas do not calculate each time the Cube is recalculated. For a more in depth understanding refer to the discussion on Persistent Calculation at the end of this section.
Notes
In the succeeding topics, the Avon Trading Database located in the C:\Program Files (x86)\PowerOLAP\Examples directory is used.