title: designing Olap cube dimensions and facts for population growth cube
body: <p>I want to create an Olap cube for Population Growth. I have a MySQL database with table: </p>
  
  <pre><code> Act (
   id  INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
   birth_date DATETIME,
   death_date DATETIME,
   place VARCHAR(20)  
   );
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and I want it to be my dimension for table Fact_Population_Growth. I want to analyze the number of births and deaths in a given time and place. However, as easy it may seem on paper, when using Pentaho Workbench for building olap cubes, I get pretty confused. Do I have only one dimension or do I have to do dimension time and dimension place? Are my measures number of births and number of deaths? Is there a way to store the difference between these two and in result have the population growth? Would this Fact_Population_Growth table do the job? :</p>
  
  <pre><code> Population_Growth(
   id INT NOT NULL,
   number_of_births INT, 
   number_of_deaths INT,
   time DATE
   place VARCHAR,
   result INT  
   );
  </code></pre>