OLAP Drillthrough Tutorial

Custom Drillthrough

Drillthrough action gives option to see details for current analysis values.

Usually, analysis means exploring aggregated values for some business subjects. Drilling and slicing functionalities will narrow analysis to particular point of interest. But, at certain moment we all want to see exact information, who, when and what, for aggregated chunk of data. For example, with analysis we found that certain product is best selling product in some city in last quarter of the year, but now we are very interesting to see details. Show me the names, dates and other purchasing details available in the OLAP cube structure. Drillthrough action gives us possibility to see details for given analysis values. Drillthrough action is available in Grid and Chart view and can be executed over some values already exists in our analysis. In the Grid view, right click on the cell will give us Drillthrough options or right click on the Chart value elements (Lines, Columns, Bars, etc.) in the Chart view. Note, that drillthrough actions for certain users could be restricted by OLAP database permissions.

OLAP drillthrough

Create Custom drillthrough

First available is „Custom drillthrough“ option, which can be selected anytime in Grid and Chart view. Right click on some value select first „Drillthrough“ and then „Custom drillthrough“ action. New „Drillthrough results“ window will open, showing elements of this drillthrough: Cube name, measures, filters, total. Total presents value for given measure, that we want to drillthrough. Filters presents all cube dimension hierarchies that were set to filters to get this results.
Now, we have to set which drillthrough columns we want to see by clicking on the „Set drillthrough columns“. New window will open „Drillthrough columns definition“ in which we select drillthrough columns from all available dimension hierarchies that are associated with measure group to which drillthrough measure belongs to. Which dimensions are associated with which measure group is implicitly set inside cube structure.
In the „Drillthrough columns definition“, browse for interesting dimension hierarchies (columns) on the left side of screen (Tree view) and click on interesting for your drillthrough. After we click on it, it will be shown in the list of selected columns on the right side of screen. We can add, remove or change order of columns.
After all columns are selected we would like to see for our drillthrough, „Run drillthrough“ button should be clicked. „Drillthrough columns definition“ window will close, and in window „Drillthrough results“ drillthrough will be executed and results will be displayed. Depending on the number of result items, drillthrough could take a while before is finished.
Drillthrough result table could be sorted by clicking on the column header and could be exported to Excel file.
User can redefine drillthrough columns to return, as many times he likes.

Share and Reuse Drillthrough

Typically, for certain business situations we would like to get certain set of drillthrough columns. Set of drillthrough columns could contain dozens of columns and, of course, we do not like to pick them again every time we run drillthrough for given situation. Once picked and defined, we could save them in Kyubit Business Intelligence application. Saved set of drillthrough columns is associated with measure group and anytime in any analysis we could run drillthrough with saved set of drillthrough columns if the value we would like to drillthrough is from measure that belongs to associated measure group. To reuse saved set of drillthrough columns, right click in the analysis on some value and within Drillthrough options, all available sets of drillthrough columns will be shown. Outside of analysis, saved set of drillthrough columns could be viewed and edited in Main Menu under menu tab Shared Items -> User Drillthrough columns.