Thursday, October 29, 2009

a generic calendar dimension

Finally had the time to activate on of my other blogs. This one will contain my more generic articles. Here is the first one: http://bizintell101.blogspot.com/2009/10/bi-101-generic-calendar-dimension.html

Feel free to comment.

Till Next Time

11 comments:

Andriy Yakushyn said...

Hi John,
Nice to see you back. I liked your article on the time dimension. I'm still going through it. My initial instinct was to argue about splitting time dimension into separate table, however, after some thinking I have to admit that for huge and aggregate fact tables - this could be a viable performance solution. Do you have any real measurements to prove that one solution is faster than the other?

Also, can you confirm that numerous date/time
tables would work with Time Dimension functionality (i.e. setting up time dimension in OBIEE). It's been my experience (and I think I've seen a service request somewhere) - that in order to use AGO,TODATE functions - you need to have 1 time dim table.

Also, I've had great success with implementing AGO,TODATE time-series functions on new projects - they improve development speed considerably (however, there're still some issues Oracle should fix - such as problem with leap years and most importantly - problem with using variables in these functions - currently not supported)

Take care - and I hope you can share more knowledge!

Voggler said...

Hi John
I also read your article and indeed it was interesting :)
I'm not sure I understood the section related to the "PeriodLastPeriod" column but it sound something that might be helpfull. Can you elaborate on the use of this column or give a simple example.
Thanks you
Amir Vogel
Logistics and BI Application Manager - Radware LTD.

Nachiket said...

1 question in OBI deliver


I want to send a notification (Alram) email to all the receipients.
How can i achieve this using OBI deliver ?

I can add receipients name( in the destination ).. but they dont receive the mail..

In the my account setting , i can edit my email addr.
There is no option of recepients's email address ..

Pls help....!!!!!!!!!!

John Minkjan said...

@naCHya,

Please put your question on BI-publisher on the OTN forum.

regards

John

mate tee said...

This is a bit of a specific problem, but I could see it being something that those new to OBIEE could run into. It deals with incorrect Grand Total values being displayed for a Calculated Column when using report filters.

Unknown said...

John,

thanks for this excellent post..

I have one question regarding the monthID in the week dimension.
I'm not sure how to reference the month dimension in case when I have a week passing between months (13th week in 2010 is in March and April as well). Its a many-to-many reference so how do you use it then?


best regards,

Ivan

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
John Minkjan said...

@Ivan,

There is no monthId in the week dimension, You can can only enter it trough year. the quarterid depens on the type of production calendar you are using

Unknown said...

@John,

but in your week table you do have a MonthID column, which is an integer and a foreign key to the Month table.


Ivan

John Minkjan said...

@Ivan,

This is only used if a compagny uses a 454 or a 445 production calendar.
regards

John

Unknown said...

@John,

thanks for your reply!

I have one more problem.

If I have a date dimension which is made of more physical tables (like in your post), the time series functions AGO and TODATE, they dont work!
I'm getting the following error: "nQSError 22045".

I see Andriy mentioned that in his post so I was wondering if anyone has a solution for this problem?

best regards,

Ivan