Configuring Data Views

Data Views are specialized views of the data in your Data Model that allow you to join data from different Data Tables and to shape data into datasets suitable for your data visualization and reporting. In essence, a Data View is a pre-built query, similar in concept and functionality to a stored procedure in a relational SQL database. A data view in BI Server is a named query, which can then be referenced by name in runtime. For example, we can create a Data View in the sample Northwind Data Model to only show orders placed by the customer with ID “ALFKI”. In this section, we will take a look at creating two types of Data Views.

• Creating a Simple Data View.
• Creating a Parameterized Data View.

Data Views themselves are entirely virtual and not cached; however the result of a Data View query may be cached. The view’s query result is not cached if the view is used in another view.

Data View results can be visualized inside Workbench or in a client application like Grid Viewer.

For more details on how to write a Data View query for BI Server, refer to the BI Server SQL Language.