Display Cube meta data

Adam Elvin

Hello community, I am wondering what capability or solutions people have come up with for displaying cube metadata to a user, for example when a user is looking at a list of cubes in a data layout for example

How can we guide them as to what information a cube holds, besides a consise naming convention, i.e. what entities is the data is held at.

 

One thought that comes to mind is having a text cube where you could filter on a cube name or a cube group and have a description of that cube, but you would probably need to have a seperate screen to show this with a button that people can click to review the cubes available. Could we automate this by running a process to capture cube metadata from logs for example so the list is up to date?

 

I would be interested to hear what other imaginative solutions other people have come up with to achieve this.

 

Thanks

Adam Elvin

As an alternative has anyone had any experiences in reading meta data from a source system such as SAP and hoding this in BOARD?

Thanks

Helmut Heimann

Hi Adam Elvin,

 

I once have build the appropriate extraction from an SAP System. But, this can take a while since SAP's ERM is based on quite a lot of tables with numerous relations from Table->Table field via Data Element (business description of the data) to Domain (technical description of the data type).

And, since cubes in BOARD are designed in a multi-dimensional way (as opposed to SAP), this would only help in such a way that you would be able to see what source-data your cube-data is probably derived from--thus you would need some more data describing the way the source data is used in BOARD, i.e. how it is transformed during the population of the cubes. In other words--I'm not quite sure how the extract of SAP's meta data would help you in describing BOARD cube data and BOARD relationships, without describing the transformation process as well (and this means pretty much effort).

 

Anyway, I hope this helps :-)

 

Kind Regards,

Helmut

Adam Elvin

Thank you Helmut Heimann. Very useful.