Append option on Reload all cubes

Alessio Biondi

1. What is your idea?

Create a new flag "append" on procedure action "reload all cubes" (Datareader > Database Reload > Cubes).

With this flag it would be good to manage the append option of the reload all cubes.

 

2. What specific problem are you trying to find a solution to, or what new scenario would this idea respond to?

Usually during projects lifetime a common maintenance activity on time range is to shrink the range in the "From Year" dropdown menu (e.g. bringing a range 2014-2018 to 2015-2018).

This is useful to make the database lighter on cube dimensions and needs to perform an extract all cubes and reload all cubes operation in order to achieve actual improvement.

Another useful feature of this maitenance activity could be to reduce the number of items in main entities (usually base of the hierarchies: think about customer or material). The main concept is to get rid of items that have become "old" and do not have any number on cubes within the new time range.

Using this approach no max item number extension should be necessary in the project and, therefore, report and dataflow performances would be always optimized.

 

3. What workaround have you found and used so far (if any)?

Unfortunately, only "reload all trees/entities" performs a datareader with append option on entites, no such behaviour is possible with the "reload all cubes" action.

So, in order to achieve the above mentioned goal, the workaround is the following:

• in a procedure select the new time range and extract all cubes to have on file only data related to the new time range
• create the list of all items moved in the new time range: select in procedure the new time range and extract a layout to file in wich all cubes with the specified entity are placed on colums. For example if I want to shrink the customer entity I would place all cubes defined by customer to have a list of codes that I will need to keep in the new time range. Setting this layout could be very time-consuming!
• create an ASCII datareader that loads those items with append option
• export the entity tree and create an ASCII datareader to reload relationships and descriptions
• perform the activities:
  1. shrink time range
  2. clear all cubes
  3. clear the entity you want to shrink
  4. reload the entity items from the custom file and reload relationships, normalize
  5. reload all cubes

 

Having an "append" option on "reload all cubes" could be of great use in such situation: there would be no need to manually create the list of moved items.

 

Thank you for your attention.

Monisha Jain

Thank you for sharing your idea, Alessio. We appreciate the time and effort you put into crafting your suggestion.

If you do not flag the “Clear before load”, you will get append option on cube. (as in screenshot) Hope this resolves your need.

Etienne CAUSSE

Hi @Monisha Jain, can you please point to the specific documentation that explains this option ? What you are saying is that this option has more than the described effect ?

The intention is to have an append on entities, and not append the cube value over itself.

Monisha Jain

Thank you Etienne for clarifying, as we previously understood that it was about append on data instead of append on entities.

As for the original idea, we understand the need of this solution now. We have accepted this Idea to be part of our backlog, as it is not on our development roadmap currently.

Alessio Biondi

Thanks @Etienne CAUSSE and @Monisha Jain