Hello all,

I was handed a new project and I'm not quite sure how to do it or even what technology to use. Now, I think that SQL Server's Analysis Services could help (or even do the entire thing) but I'm not sure. So, basically, I'm looking for recommendations and ressources on the subject.

Here's my scenario:

We have a Data-Warehouse that stores information about the production of our company. Around this fact table, we have multiple dimensions including one about the origin of the production (who) and a time dimension (when).

We are buiding cubes and linking Excel to them for future analysis. Everything is done. Now, the all-mighty supervisors would like to have some predictions built-in to the system for the rest of the year based on the previous years. Basically, we would be adding production values for every possible time (the step is every hour, so the sum of the production comming from a certain origin is set as the fact and linked to a time dimension row for that hour).

As you can see, it's not very difficult and it seems to me like Analysis Services might already have that functionnality although I couldn't find it (seems like predictions can only be made by looking at relations found by the data mining algorithms and these predictions need to be made by a human because they are not really registered as "new" facts).

So, in short, I'd like to have a tool calculate future productions for the rest of the year and set a new column (or dimension) to a certain value indicating that this fact row has been predicted and is not certain. Of course, the refreshing of data would not create duplicate rows for predictions, newer predictions (probably based on more facts) would replace the last equivalent prediction.

I hope that's clear.

What do you recommend I use? Is it a case where I will need to build my own separate program (that updates the data-warehouse) or is it possible to achieve this using data mining?

Thanks a lot,

SC