Lots of Attributes in a Dimension

Hi there. This my second post in the space of 5 minutes - apologies.
I have a PRODUCT dimension which has lots of columns in the source table. Some lend themselves to hierarchies whereas some do not. Let me try and explain. I have 3 attributes which I have mapped to a hierarchy and it lets me navigate the product branding i.e. from All Products - Brand Group - Brand - Product SKU. I then have another 3 attributes which let me navigate through the product packaging i.e. All Products - Pack Type - Pack Format - Product SKU. But I have another set of "attributes" e.g. whether the product is organic or not, whether the product is ambient or not. So with this I have a few questions:
I need this information to be accessible in the cube. My first attempt was to set up attributes against the SKU. But I'm using the SIMBA MDX driver and
1) Accessing level attributes is restrictive in that I can't filter by them - they are simply an extra label that I can place next to the member.
2) If I set up lots of hierarchies (allbeit it with few levels in), then again, using Excel, I can only work with one hierarchy at a time, so I would be unable to consider say Organic Products only while using the Brand hierarchy.
I'm relatively new to this and not as technical with MDX or the view I hear you guys refer to on this forum. Could someone please help me with some basics here and advise on how I might structure my Product dimension properly?
Thank you so much in advance.

Hi,
What version of the Simba MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP are you using? Attribute filtering has been supported since version 3.0.
To filter on an attribute in Excel, right click on the appropriate member, and select Filter > Label Filters...
In the dialog that appears, use the drop downs to select the attribute, the comparison type, and the value.
Hope this helps.
Mike

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TIME_DSO_1 attribute in Time Dimension

Hi,
We are using Oracle Analytic Workspace Manager version 10.2.0.3.0A for creating a cube.
We have defined a dimension as "Time" dimension and have also specified the dimension type as "Time".
This dimension has the levels: Year, Quarter, Month, Week and Day. These levels are for the one and only hierarchy of the Time dimension.
The attributes of the dimension (applicable to all the levels) are: END_DATE, LONG_DESCRIPTION, SHORT_DESCRIPTION, and TIME_SPAN.
In this structure, we are having a strange observation : During the process of defining this TIME dimension, there were some problems with the machine (it got hanged) and so we had to exit (kill) the AWM and come in again. When we logged in to AWM again, we could see a new attribute called TIME_DSO_1 defined within the Time dimension by itself.
Can anyone let us know what is this attribute all about ? And can we go ahead and just delete this from our dimension structure without creating problems for ourselves?
Many thanks in advance for the kind inputs of the forum.
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Hi,
I can't say that I really understand how your data shows up, but I do see an error in your hierarchy.
What you should do is split it up into two hierarchies.
Year-> Quarter-> Month-> Day
and
Year-> Week-> Day
And here is the reason:
A day can easily have a week as a parent and month. But week cannot. Since a month can end on any given day in a week, that means that a week can have two parents. If I take the next week as an example. Mon, tue, wed, thu and fri would belong to the august month, while the rest of the week would belong to september. But the entire week would still be week 35. And its the same issue with quarter. Months can be added into a quarter, but weeks can not.
Now, I'm not sure if this would solve all your problems, but there might be a few other things you might check out and thats what ID's you populate your member fields with.
say that you have used the month numbers (or at least the same id for every january and so on)to populate your months. If that is the case things will also behave extremely weird and slow. What you need to do is to create unique IDs for every month (and any other level) so that you are sure that january 2007 don't have any child records that really should belong to january 2006.
As a general rule, the member field needs to contain a completely unique value across on from all levels. The "generate surrogate key" functionality helps you a bit along the way as it adds the name of your level in front of the value that you load. If the values you load doesn't have unique values within the level it won't help you any.
Hope this can help you some more... ;)
regards Ragnar

ORA-35563: Multiple values exist for an attribute of this dimension member

After following the tutorial Building OLAP Cubes I was trying to make a cube with aggregation down to the day instead of down to the month.
I created a times table pretty similar to the one used in the tutorial:
CREATE TABLE EVENT_TIMES (
        HOUR_KEY        DATE NOT NULL,
        DAY_ID          VARCHAR2(10),
        DAY_NAME        VARCHAR2(10),
        DAY_END_DATE    DATE,
        DAY_TIME_SPAN   NUMBER,
        MONTH_ID        VARCHAR2(30) NOT NULL,
        MONTH_NAME      VARCHAR2(40),
        MONTH_END_DATE DATE,
        MONTH_TIME_SPAN NUMBER,
        YEAR_ID         VARCHAR2(30) NOT NULL,
        YEAR_NAME       VARCHAR2(40),
        YEAR_END_DATE   DATE,
        YEAR_TIME_SPAN NUMBER
As you can see, instead of a DAY_KEY like in the tutorial, I now use an HOUR_KEY.
This is a sample of the data I inserted in this table:
select to_char(hour_key,'YYYYMMDDHH24MISS'),DAY_ID,DAY_NAME,DAY_END_DATE,DAY_TIME_SPAN,MONTH_ID,MONTH_NAME,MONTH_END_DATE,MONTH_TIME_SPAN,YEAR_ID,YEAR_NAME,YEAR_END_DATE,YEAR_TIME_SPAN from event_times;
TO_CHAR(HOUR_KEY,'YYYYMMDDHH24MISS') DAY_ID     DAY_NAME   DAY_END_DATE DAY_TIME_SPAN MONTH_ID                       MONTH_NAME                               MONTH_END_DATE MONTH_TIME_SPAN YEAR_ID                        YEAR_NAME                                YEAR_END_DATE YEAR_TIME_SPAN
20140104050000                       Y2014M1D4 Y2014M1D4 04-JAN-14                1 Y2014M1                        Y2014M1                                  31-JAN-14                   31 Y2014                          Y2014                                    31-DEC-14                365
20140104060000                       Y2014M1D4 Y2014M1D4 04-JAN-14                1 Y2014M1                        Y2014M1                                  31-JAN-14                   31 Y2014                          Y2014                                    31-DEC-14                365
I then created my TIME dimension with DAY as the lowest level.
When I try the maintain cube option it fails at the 'LOAD NO SYNCH' step with the rejected records having an error message that says:
ORA-35563: (XSRWLD17) Multiple values exist for an attribute of this dimension member.
To me, this is a very cryptic message and the only explanation I find online is:
Cause
Multiple source table rows containing different values for a dimension attribute were found. Only the first of the multiple rows has been loaded.
Action
Fix the mapping or remove the rows with conflicting attribute values..
This confuses me. In the tutorial the lowest level was day and the TIMES table contained 1 record for each day.
In my example, the lowest level is hour and the TIMES table contains 1 record for each hour.
Which attribute has multiple values? And which values?
The rejected records (101) are not very clear:
ALIAS_1 = 'MONTH_Y2014M1' AND ALIAS_3 = to_date('31JAN14') AND ALIAS_4 = 31 AND ALIAS_5 = 'Y2014M1' AND ALIAS_6 = 'Y2014M1' AND ALIAS_7 = 'YEAR_Y2014'
If anyone can help point me in the right direction, it would be greatly appreciated.

I have seen this recently. The issue is with the dimension load itself. You have a hour level record table but the rules relating to hierarchy/attribute values etc are checked/reinforced during the load and this error comes up sometimes.
I would guess that the issue seems to be with your month level information present in the higher level month columns. There are many records corresponding to a single month in ur case, month of Y2014M1. Information relating to Month level member Jan 2014 or member MONTH_Y2014M1 is present in these records: 31 (days) *24 (hours) = 744 records. The data in these 744 records for columns - MONTH_ID, MONTH_NAME, MONTH_END_DATE, MONTH_TIME_SPAN need to be exactly the same in order for the single member MONTH_Y2014M1 to have month attributes loaded with valid values.
For e.g: if records #1 to #743 contain month_timespan=31 but for some unknown reason record #744 contains month_timespan=30 then this error will come up. OLAP does not know which value to load (31 or 30), and only 1 value can be loaded onto the month level member corresponding to month Y2014M1.
A quick check of the data should give you the answer. Typically there may be some mistake/invalid assumptions made with the boundary records (in your case, check for values for records corresponding to hour=0 or hour=23/24) which is causing the issue.
HTH
Shankar

Dynamically adding more attributes to cube dimension in SSAS 2008 R2

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Thanks
BI Developer

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http://msftasprodsamples.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=SS2008%21Readme_AMOAdventureWorks&referringTitle=Home
Notice the parts which add attributes to a dimension.
http://artisconsulting.com/Blogs/GregGalloway

OLAP query returning "name" rather than "key" attribute for a dimension

Hello,
I am busy with a project that involves drawing data from an OLAP cube (in SAP BW), then transforming and contextualising for use in an EMI environment. The project runs on MII 12.1.
The standard OLAP connector and OLAP queries have been used (would prefer not to go the route of creating a call to the OLAP XMLA web service directly). One of the important dimensions is returned as a name (descriptive text) rather than a key (the cost element code itself), preventing us from reliably applying business rules to classify cost elements. Categorising cost elements based on their text descriptions is not a sustainable solution.
The output needs to allow for two dimensions (cost element and an equipment identifier) against which individual cost values will be listed. It appears that the two dimensions must both be on the "x-axis", as result columns are automatically renamed, e.g. C000001, C000002, etc. If anyone knows of a way to suppress this renaming behaviour, please let me know.
Is it possible to force the "key" attribute to be returned instead of the "name" attribute? I have identified two preferred options:
1. MDX syntax of the query itself
2. configuration of the OLAP connector
I have not found a way to do this through MDX syntax, but would welcome any suggestions.
Alternatively, perhaps there is a non-standard way of configuring the OLAP connector so that the key rather than the name attribute is returned for all dimensions. Has anyone anything, e.g. chosen a non-standard ColumnNameAttribute or DataTypeAttribute, in this regard?
Thanks,
Marc Chaplin

<b>Apologies for the formatting above</b>
Part 1:
Hello,
I am busy with a project that involves drawing data from an OLAP cube (in SAP BW), then transforming and contextualising for use in an EMI environment. The project runs on MII 12.1.
The standard OLAP connector and OLAP queries have been used (would prefer not to go the route of creating a call to the OLAP XMLA web service directly). One of the important dimensions is returned as a name (descriptive text) rather than a key (the cost element code itself), preventing us from reliably applying business rules to classify cost elements. Categorising cost elements based on their text descriptions is not a sustainable solution.
The output needs to allow for two dimensions (cost element and an equipment identifier) against which individual cost values will be listed. It appears that the two dimensions must both be on the <i>x-axis</i>, as result columns are automatically renamed, e.g. C000001, C000002, etc. If anyone knows of a way to suppress this renaming behaviour, please let me know.

Error occured whenever adding an attribute to a dimension

After I added an attribute to a new dimension, I encountered the error as below.
I also cannot read the metadata from Jdeveloper after I create a cube using AWM.
Please kindly help!!
BI Beans Diagnostics(v1.0.2.0) 2005/9/15
===============================================================================
JDEV_ORACLE_HOME .......................... = C:\jdev1012_base
JAVA_HOME ................................. = c:\j2sdk1.4.2_02
JDeveloper version ........................ = 10.1.2.0.0.1811
BI Beans release description .............. = BI Beans 10.1.2 Production Release
BI Beans component number ................. = 10.1.2.52.0
BI Beans internal version ................. = 3.2.1.0.13
Connect to database ....................... = Successful
JDBC driver version ....................... = 10.1.0.3.0
JDBC JAR file location .................... = C:\jdev1012_base\jdbc\lib
Database version .......................... = 10.2.0.1.0
OLAP Catalog version ...................... = 10.2.0.1.0
OLAP AW Engine version .................... = 10.2.0.1.0
OLAP API Server version ................... = 10.2.0.1.0
BI Beans Catalog version .................. = N/A; not installed in BI_TEST
OLAP API JAR file version ................. = "10.1.0.2.0"
OLAP API JAR file location ................ = C:\jdev1012_base\jdev\lib\ext
Load OLAP API metadata .................... = Successful
java.lang.NullPointerException
at oracle.dss.metadataManager.server.drivers.mdm._92.MDMMetadataDriverIm
pl_92.setDimAttributes(MDMMetadataDriverImpl_92.java:1733)
at oracle.dss.metadataManager.server.drivers.mdm._92.MDMMetadataDriverIm
pl_92.getChildren(MDMMetadataDriverImpl_92.java:197)
at oracle.dss.metadataManager.server.drivers.mdm._92.MDMMetadataDriverIm
pl_92.addChildren(MDMMetadataDriverImpl_92.java:2687)
at oracle.dss.metadataManager.server.drivers.mdm._92.MDMMetadataDriverIm
pl_92.fillOlapObjectModel(MDMMetadataDriverImpl_92.java:2571)
at oracle.dss.metadataManager.server.drivers.mdm._92.MDMMetadataDriverIm
pl_92$LoadOlapObjectModel.run(MDMMetadataDriverImpl_92.java:3013)

I've got it resolved.
I have to add levels and hierarchies before adding any attribute.
That's strong!

Material attributes in separate dimension?

Hi BW experts,
As a new member I have been looking for a similar topic but unfortunately I can't find anything on it so I was hoping one of you could help me out.
I want to redesign our stock/movement cube due to performance issues. One step is to have the 0MAT_PLANT as a separate (line-item) dimension as opposed to a charateristic of 0MATERIAL. I assume this will help a great deal since 0MAT_PLANT has over 8.5 M entries which does not really help to speed up any queries. (fact table has about 40M records)
Another thing is that I would like to create a separate dimension with 0MAT_PLANT navigational attributes like service level, ABC indicator etc. These fields are now in the material dimension and I reckon these nav attr blow up the dimension massively since one material has multiple service levels and ABC indicators. Can I just drag in these field into a new dimension, say Material Attributes and still have them in there as master data?!
In other words, can I create a dimension with only 0MAT_PLANT navigational attributes and what are the consequences of this?
Thanks heaps!
Cheers,
Niels

Thanks Pizzaman.
I do not think it will be a good idea to physically put the master data in the cube in my case so I have to keep it as master data.
Can you explain to me what happens when I take the following steps:
I take out the 0MAT_PLANT characteristic (which has 8.5M records) and create a separate (line item) dimension for it and I leave the NA for 0MAT_PLANT (like service level and ABC indicator) in the Material dimension.
Would this have any impact on the number of records to be read when I run a query for plant, material and ABC indicator?
Doesn't the query still have to read the 8.5M records which are now in the 0MAT_PLANT dimension instead of the 0MATERIAL dimension?
So does creating a separate 0MAT_PLANT dimension have any impact on query performance?
I do understand you point about the indexes and that might work.
Hope you can help me with this
Thanks.
Cheers

How to create a working day/holiday attribute in Time Dimension with OWB ?

Hello everybody,
I am trying with no success to create a Time Dimension (with the wizard it would be easier...) with a working day or holiday attribute (0 or 1) to be able to calculate measures only on working time !!! I am totally sure it's possible, obviously, but I found nothing on forums... Could you help me ??
I use OWB 11g, I need all fiscal year/quarter/month/week and all calendar year/quarter/month/week attributes so without any wizard it would be quite impossible... thank you for your help !
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Francois
Edited by: [email protected] on Jun 15, 2009 8:24 AM

Hi,
First of all, thanks everyone for your help.
I did several tests this morning.
First of all, i've tried with time_from = 000000 and time_to = 235959 (23:59:59 CET) and the activity has been created with Time From = 04:00:00 and Time To = 03:59:59
Strange no ??
I've also tried with 230000 for time from and time to but the activity has been created with Time From = 03:00:00 and Time to = 03:00:00
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Johnny Baillargeaux

Help in creating MDX Calculated Member using attributes from multiple Dimension

Hi All,
First of all my knowledge on MDX is basic. In one of our projects, there is a requirement to create calculated member (similar to derived fields in SQL) which is more of a dimension attribute and not really a calculated member. Due to IP issues I cannot paste
the actual queries but I will provide an SQL Query equivalent to what I am trying to achieve:
Select P.Product, Case When ISNULL(FS.ArtistName,'') = '' Then P.ArtistName Else FS.ArtistName End Artist
From
dbo.FactMusicSales FS
Join dbo.dimProduct P
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We are trying to replicate the logic for derving the "Artist" field using MDX script.
We are running into issues while trying to build an MDX expression using the above logic. The main issue being that the new field/member "Artist" would not be calculated unless its elements are selected (FS.ArtistName, P.ArtistName). Besides this
we are also unable to place this new member in a different folder other than a sub folder under the measures. Any pointers to solving this would be really helpful.
Thanks in Advance,
Venki

Hi Venki,
According to your description, you need to create calculated member (similar to derived fields in SQL) which is more of a dimension attribute and not really a calculated member, right?
In your scenario, you needn't to achieve this requirement by using MDX. You can use a named query on your data source view. A named query is a SQL expression represented as a table. In a named query, you can specify an SQL expression to select rows and columns
returned from one or more tables in one or more data sources. So in you scenario, you can use your query on the DSV, and then use the modified table to create a dimension.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-IN/library/ms175683.aspx
Regards,
Charlie Liao
TechNet Community Support

Map BW attribute to BPC Dimension during transactional data load

Hi,
I am loading the transactional data from BW cube to BPC Application. we ave functional area as dimension in BPC and the BW cube doesnot have Functional area. So we are in a situation to derive it . Dimensio Profitcenter of BW has functional area as Attribute. so we need to populate the BPC functional area with the BW functional area which is an attribute of 0PROFIT_CTR.
Any Input will be appreciate.
Sanjay

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I have a time dimension(simplified one).
It consists of
DateKey int
Date DateTime
MonthName Text
MonthVal Date (1st day of month)
The dimension processes correctly if I don't have the Month ValueCol attribute set to "monthVal", but if I set it I get a "Duplicate keys" error. As the grain of the dimension is day, there is obviously going to be duplicates in the MonthVal
column.
In this case, how do I set the monthValue property without experiencing a processing error due to duplicate keys?

Hello,
I would suggest you go through the following article to troubleshoot "Duplicate Keys" error when process a dimension in SSAS, please see:
Analysis Services: Errors in the OLAP storage engine: A duplicate attribute key has been found when processing:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/19726.analysis-services-errors-in-the-olap-storage-engine-a-duplicate-attribute-key-has-been-found-when-processing.aspx
If you have any feedback on our support, please click
here.
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Elvis Long
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Attributes in dimension

Hi there,
This is more of a question around dimension modelling.
Should we be adding attributes of a master data info-object as part of the dimension even if the master data info-object is already part of the same dimension? e.g. if material group is an attribute and material is already part of Product dimension, is it wise to add matgrp in the dimension?
I think it increases the size of the dim.table by generating more no. of SID combinations.
How does this approach work performance wise vs.
1. Not adding attributes at all if Master data info obj. is already part of the dimension and adding them as and when required in the query designer.
2. Marking the attribute as navigational.
Suffice it to say, that the attributes in the dimension would have extensive analysis, i.e. a lot of queries would be based on these attributes.
Thanks.
Ashu.

Ashutosh,
The decision to model an attribute as a part of a dimension or as a navigational attribute is decided by how changes to the attribute value are to be handled.
For e.g. If Mat1 belongs to Grp1 today and it changes to Grp2 say a month down the line how is the data to be reported.
if it is to be reported as per the group that it was in when the transaction was created, then it should be modeled as a part of the dimension.
If the data is to be reported as per the latest value, even for data that was created when it was actually in GRP1, then it has to be modeled as a navigational attrobute.
Assuming that you want scenario 1, then it should be modeled in the same dimension as the material. As every material belongs to only one material group, the number of entries in the dimension table will not increase. The number of SID combinations should not increase.
Cheers
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SSAS Tabular: Show balance on latest dimension attribute

Hi,
I have a fact with transactions over time eg.
20140101, 1000
20140105,-400
In SSAS Tabular, I want to add a balance (saldo) measure, that shows the balance on any given date from my date dimension
Balance 20140106: 600
I can do this by using SUMX (or summarize)
Saldo:=SUMX(
VALUES('Date'[Date])
,CALCULATE(
SUM(Fact[Amount])
,DATESBETWEEN('Date'[Date],BLANK(),LASTDATE('Date'[Date]))
,ALL('Date')
The issue arises when I want to show the balance for an attribute from a dimension related to the latest fact entry. I can calculate this on dates that has transactions like this:
Saldo_MaxFact:=MAXX(
VALUES('Fact'[FactId])
,CALCULATE(
SUM(Fact[Amount])
,DATESBETWEEN('Date'[Date],BLANK(),LASTDATE('Date'[Date]))
,ALL('Date')
,ALL('Fact'[FactId])
,ALL('Dimension')
But on dates with no transactions, this measure is empty (which makes sense, since there is no FactId to roll-up the sum to).
How would I go about creating a measure that rolls up to any given date AND the attributes on the latest fact entry?
I have created a sample snapshot: http://1drv.ms/1ly4o6a
Sample Excel Power Pivot model: http://1drv.ms/1jy2nkX
Any help would be much appreciated!

Hi Greg,
Finally I found the problem why the query goes out of memory in tabular mode. I guess this information will helpful for others and I am posting my findings.
Some of the non-key attribute columns in the tabular model tables (mainly the tables which form dimensions) do not contain pretty names. So for the non-key attribute columns which I need to provide pretty names I renamed the columns to something else.
For an example, in my date dimension there is a non-key attribute named “DateAltKey”. This is the date column which I am using. As this is not pretty to the client tools I renamed this column as “Date” inside the designer (Dimension
design screen). I deployed the cube, processed the cube and no problem.
Now here comes the fun part. For every table, inside the Tables node (Tabular SSAS Database > Tables) you can view the partition details. You have single partition per dimension table if you do not create extra partitions. I opened the partitions screen
and clicked on the “Edit” icon and performed a Syntax Check. Surprisingly it failed. It complains about the renamed column. It complained “Date” cannot be found in source. So I realized that I cannot simply rename the columns like that.
After that I created calculated columns (with a pretty name) for all the columns which complained and all the source columns to the calculated columns were hid from the client tools. I deployed the cube, processed the cube and performed a
syntax check. No errors and everything were perfect.
I ran the query which gave me trouble and guess what... it executed within 5 seconds. My problem is solved. I really do not know who did this improve the performance but the trick worked for me.
Thanks a lot for your support.
Chandima

Lots of Attributes in a Dimension

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