Deleting entity members in Board 11

Joris van den Boogaard

Hi Fellow community members,

In Board 10, deleting entity members was/is against best practice.

Has this changed in Board 11? I reckoned this might be the case since also the max item# property is not there anymore.

If yes, is there a difference between a migrated database and a fresh Board 11 database?

Thanks for your insights!

Kind regards,

Joris

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Paul Wyatt

Hi Joris,

It is still possible to easily delete an active entity and inadvertently destroy your capsule layouts.

The image below displays [1] the delete function ready to be performed against [2] a key dimension. However, we can now carry out an analysis [3] on entities and cubes to see the impact deleting the object would have and where. Whats more, we can actually jump to the relevant locations from the screen below on selecting the relevant area in the [3] analysis window.

So, best practice still stands but can now be enhanced to include the impact analysis for precise follow up action

Hope this helps a little.

Regards.

Joris van den Boogaard

Hi Paul Wyatt - Avison Young UK

Thanks for this; the analysis function can indeed be useful in some cases. However, Actually I was talking about deleting entity members. Not about deleting an entity as a whole.

In Until Board 10, manually deleting entity members is a worst practice (see slide below from board education). This is because it can conflict with e.g. max item # and version and this lead to data inconsistency.

So with Board 11, that promotes itself as a version where we do not need to worry any more about versions and max item#, I wondered if this also goes for deleting entity members.

Thanks for the further insights :-)

Paul Wyatt

Hi Joris,

You did indeed state clearly Entity members so I apologise for the misunderstanding. I will now also experiment and report the outcome when next have a bit of time.

Giacomo Fosci

Hi Joris,

I've the same question/problem.

Did you have any new information about it?

I was wondering if can I delete a member without have any problem...

Regards,

Giacomo

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Giacomo Fosci
BI Specialist
GRUPPO MUTUIONLINE SPA
Italy
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Helmut Heimann

Hi, @Joris van den Boogaard and @Paul Wyatt,

you might want to have a look at this page from our resources: Deleting entity members

as it might give useful background information. To summarize and update: No, this has not changed in B11, it still is not the best thing to do.

And, there is no difference between a migrated and a fresh B11 database concerning this topic.

Best Regards,

Helmut

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Helmut Heimann
Senior Consultant
Board Community
Germany
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simon chick

Hi @Helmut Heimann

How about B12? For B12, is it still need to follow the best practice to delete entities members?

Thanks
Simon

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simon chick
Senior EPM (Board) Developer (Business Intelligence)
TELEGRAPH MEDIA GROUP LIMITED
United Kingdom
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Helmut Heimann

Hi @simon chick,

this is a best practice and hence should be adhered to.
The database uses internal IDs of your entity members for reference, not the codes. Whenever a code is deleted, this
is not the case for the internal ID; this switches to the next "free member". Thus, all references used in selections
(screens, procedures) might become unusable.
That said: yes, it is still the best thing to do if you want to delete entity members.

Kind regards
Helmut

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Helmut Heimann
Senior Consultant
Board Community
Germany
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