I’m afraid that design post was too dense and somebody just missed this useful technique of managing time-related stuff.Using @Time you can get current date and therefore update allocation table importing fact data to include current month. Or lock the past quarter in application, since i’s budget is already accepted.See cognoise theme for an example.
Just a rule to follow. Create time dimension so that detail item iids are consistent\meaningful and then add all summary items. So then in common Months dlist you’d get 1-12 for months, 13 for “1 Quater”, 14 for “2nd Quater” and so on. That will allow you to use simple time arithmetics in dlist formated [...]
New Supportlink‘s article on EP+BI led me to my 2cents on EP + BI integration topic: Carefully select dimension for publish. – Its elements will become columns in published table, so if you want database only processing, you’d be able to preform complex calculations (mean, percentile, variance) only on those columns. By adding local processing [...]
Usually these are the signs of coming disaster in an EP system: 1) too many dlists of the same “dimension”, some elements thrown out for cutting volumes, calculating or not calculating smth, and you have all seen them laying around just because they seemed to consistent at the time of creation. 2) manually maintained access [...]
8.2 makes many things nice&simple. To get a full budget report we need to do the following: 1) Publish the whole application 2) Run the report on published data Publishing a typical application of 100+ elist takes around 20 minutes, so no real-time here. But 8.2 introduces trickle publish, allowing to incrementally publish only changed [...]
@AddLocalPreselection macro allows you to “slice” all cubes in macro on dlist selection. You can choose one month and all commands in macro will be applied only to this month slices. By setting up an input variable for this macro, you make choice dynamic. Macro starts, you choose month and them all commands are applied [...]
It’s rather convenient to mark calculation-specific elements, which should be hidden from end-user, by placing some sign in front of dlist item name (for example ‘#’). Then in Contributor you can create saved selection “Auxiliary” with Filter “# *” to include all such elements. After that, create an Access-Table with “Auxiliary” Hidden, and there you [...]
Dlist formula comments( // markup) appear in Contributor as elem Annotations. Since there is no way of discovering formulas in Contributor (like F7 in Analyst), sometimes it’s better to duplicate dlist elem fomula commented and show this round-up way.
Elist should always be as high as possible in dimension order. Dimension rules apply to it as to subtotal dlist. Interesting effects can be reached by placing complex calculations after elist — they’ll work only on review level.
Big dimensions are ep’s doom for sure. But nevertheless we need them to get going. Problem statement: A regional sales planning model to be created. 10k products(with product subgroups), spread among number of regions selling some subsets of product list (each subset is relatively small, about 2k els). Regions are contributors. Oh yes, cognos innovation [...]