Cubes in an OLAP database have to be filled with data from a data warehouse, data mart or operational database. PowerDesigner allows you to generate a text file that will be used by an OLAP tool to create and populate cubes using data from operational sources.
In a PDM multidimensional diagram, each cube is associated with a query. There is one cube per mapping and per data source. The query defined on a cube is used to extract data from a data warehouse or operational database to populate the cubes in the OLAP database. The link between the data warehouse database and the OLAP database is a relational to multidimensional mapping.
For more information about relational to multidimensional mapping, see "Relational to multidimensional mapping" section in Chapter 12, Object Mappings in the Core Features Guide .
When you generate cube data, PowerDesigner produces one text file for each selected cube and each selected data source. The name of the generated file is a concatenation of the name of the cube and the name of the data source.
Each file contains the following fields: