Time Dimension - Additional Attributes..

Hi
We are building a Financial Services BI Applications. In one of my Cube, for Time Dimension, i need to add more attributes like
for Month Level i need the following
a) End Date of the Month
b) No of Days in the Month
at Quarter Level
a) End Date of the Quarter
b) No of Days at the Quarter
and likewise.
I can do this in AWs using attributes, however in essbase since i have to tag the TIME dimension as DENSE, it is not allowing me to create any attributes. Has somebody solved this problem in the past. Please help.
Thanks
bala

Any more recommendations please..
I cannot use UDAs as it expects that the consumer of the UDA knows the value set.
i.e. in Time Dimension assume the leaf is
200701 (UDA 31)
I would want something like this
if provided 200701 then the server should return 31 as the number of days.. However if i use UDA then i can only check (if @UDA(200701) = 31) then
here it assumes that i know the attribute value before hand which i would not know..
Please help as we are reaching a critical stage in our project
Thanks
bala

Similar Messages

TIME dimension processing fails saying "..attribute key cannot be found.." in EPM 10

After upgrading from version 7.5 to EPM 10, when we ran a ‘Full Process’ on the TIME dimension, it ran into an error saying “Errors in the OLAP storage engine: The attribute key cannot be found when processing: Table: 'dbo_tblFactCapEx', Column: 'TIMEID', Value: '20090013'. The attribute is 'Time_TIMEID'. (1/13/2015 2:41:02 PM)”.
Full error message is attached herewith – ‘Time Dimension Error.txt’
After researching, we did discover that MONTHNUM needed to be converted to BASE_PERIOD. Re-processed which produced the same error.
Prior to migration to version 7.5, we ran a full process on TIME dimension there. It completed successfully, confirming the issue is only with version 10.
Confirmed we could see the TIMEID value of 20090013 in the following places:
Time Dimension in the appropriate TIMEID attribute column.
Confirmed mbrTIME table had base member ID with TIMEID attribute filled out correctly.
Data in tblFactFINANCE could be pulled using that TIMEID
We truncated all the records in all the fact tables associated to this TIME dimension.
Eventually, when none of the tables had any records, the TIME dimension then processed successfully.
We this began to suspect the issue may not really be related to bad records.
We conducted one more test to confirm this.
Using an input form in EPM 10, we manually entered data in one of the models (at this point none of the fact tables have any records)
Ran Full Optimize on that model with Compress Database and Index Defragmentation checked – This step failed with the error attached in ‘MatrixRateFullOptimize.txt’
Ran Full process on Time Dimension – Failed indicating issue with TimeID 2012001 (that’s my manual entry). Attached error report ‘TimeDim Error MatrixRate.txt’
At this point, the table only contains the manually entered records (no suspected bad records)
We then suspected there could have been an issue with the upgrade process.
So we reprocessed all the dimension and optimized all the models in version 7.5, made a new backup and restored it to version 10.
The issue still persisted!
At this point, we have tried all the possibilities we could think of. Each time the fact table is populated with records, the TIME dimension process fails indicating ‘the attribute key’ cannot be found.
There is probably something in the OLAP partition that is not able to link the dimension attributes to the cubes.
Additional Information:
Please find attached the existing Time Dimension – TimeDimensionMembers.xlxs
Version of Excel used: Excel 2007, SP3 MSO (12.0.6683.5000)
System Specs: Please see screenshot below.

Thank you all for responding! This issue is resolved.
Here’s what the issue was:
The time structure is TOTAL >> Years >> Quarters >> Months (e.g. T.ALL >> 2012.TOTAL >> 2012.Q1 >> 2012.P01)
As shown in the screenshot below, the LEVEL for ‘T.ALL’ member was set to YEAR, which is incorrect (we can’t have Year rolling up to a Year)
We changed the LEVEL to ‘TOTAL’ and this fixed the issue!!
If only it gave a better error message than the “..attribute key not found” message

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.
Regards,
Piyush

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

Time Dimension Type allows different values in attributes - Bug or Feature?

Not sure if this is a bug or a feature.
But if one has multiple hierarchies on a Time dimension. You have the ability to specify different values for member attributes in different hierarchies.
Example.
Hierarchy A has MIN_ID for it's Member and uses MIN_END_DATE for it's END_DATE
Hierarchy B has MIN_ID for it's Member and uses SESS_END_DATE for it's END_DATE
As per this post and David Greenfield's comment:
Dimension Sort issue when multiple mappings for different hierarchies
"Are you attempting to map the same attribute, SORT, to different columns in the two hierarchies? Put another way, do you expect the same member to have different values for the attribute in the two different hierarchies? If so, then this is a problem since a member must have the same value for the attribute regardless of the hierarchy."
Unlike a user dimension, a time dimension appears to allow this and it appears to work as intended. Is the behavior in this case intended to be different between a user and time dimension?

I think that this is not a bug. There is an incompatibility in design which prevents you from using the same attribute differently for both hierarchies.
NOTE: Unlike parent relationship which depends on <dimension, dimension hierarchy>, Dimension Attribute is dependent on <dimension> alone, not dependent on <dimension, dimension hierarchy> combination. Hence it can only take on 1 value for 1 dimension member.
I think that the time dimension only appears to allow this. The key thing to check is for Time Dimension members which are common to both the hierarchies. Only one of the mappings will take effect (usually the hierarchy which is loaded last will remain in the aw/usable for queries, reports.. it would have over-written the earlier attribute value loaded as per the earlier hierarchy load).
Visualize a dimension as a long list of members which are built up contiguously on a per hierarchy, per level process using the mapping information saved. Once a member is defined (created) via Hierarchy A, it wont be created once again while loading Hierarchy B but is instead updated or redefined based on Hierarchy B's mapping info.
Assuming the dimension load attempts to load Hierarchy A first and then Hierarchy B,
* Dimension load for Hierarchy A will define the various members using MIN_ID and set the END_DATE attribute to value=MIN_END_DATE
* Dimension load for Hierarchy B will re-define the various members using MIN_ID and re-set or over-write the END_DATE attribute to value=SESS_END_DATE
* In this case, it looks like all members are common for both hierarchies (as both members are mapped to same column MIN_ID) and you would end up with END_DATE=SESS_END_DATE.
Actually whether all members are common to both hierarchies or not depends on the quality of data in your snowflake/star table: if parent level for Hierarchy A as well as Hierarchy B is setup fine then the members will be same set (overlapping in whole). If some rows for MIN_ID have parent column for Hierarchy A setup correctly but parent column for Hierarchy B =null or invalid value then that member will exist in Hierarchy A alone and would contain END_DATE=MIN_END_DATE as the corresponding update along Hierarchy B would fail due to hierarchy data quality issues (join from current level to parent level).
As regards a solution to your problem, you should not use the same attribute "SORT" for dual purpose (both hierarchies). Instead define attributes SORT_A and SORT_B and make them enabled for Hierarchy A, Hierarchy B respectively and map/use them appropriately in your reports.
HTH
Shankar

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 !
NB: of course I know how to define if a day is a working one or not, but I currently can't add any columns in Time dim created with wizard...
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
I cannot understand the logic behind....
Thanks,
Johnny Baillargeaux

PeriodsToDate and single Time dimension Attributes

Hi folks,
I just want to kindly confirm with you, if the PeriodsToDate function works only with user hierarchy?
That is because I am building some YTD calculation and I have two user hierarchies in the Time dimension, let´s say Markenting Calendar and Fiscal Calendar, but also I have single attributes that do not belong to any of these hierarchies like RetailDay.
Could I build a PeriodsToDate for these attributes?
I think the answer is no, because if a year is not related through the user hierarchy, how could the siblings be found.
Any comment will be appreciated.

Hello,
Basicly,PeriodsToDate function expects level expression for the first argument,i think it should be hierarcy level,since it should be hierarchy level,second argument should be hierarchy member as well,otherwise it throws an error.This is what i know.Hope
this helps.
Thanks,

Semi additive Measures across non time dimensions

Hello,
I need to make my measure semi additive across a non time dimension (Since I am getting totals at each level and I cant roll up the children to the parent, instead create a dummy member at the lower level for total and use FirstChild). Is it advisable to change the dimension type to time to achieve this functionality?
Thanks
Arun

I had followed exactly the same approach specified in the paper without using parent child dimensions. I had created "blank" members instead of the same name as the parent member. Now, the issue is, I have to make the measure's aggregation as "FirstChild" so that it takes the "blank" member's value for the parent.
Another issue is, I have multiple dimensions in the cube and I have aggregated data across dimensions in my source. For Example,
Col1                                                          Col2
Dimension A Level1 Member1           Dimension B Level 1 Member 1           1000
Dimension A Level1 Member1           Dimension B Level 2 Member 1           500
Dimension A Level1 Member1           Dimension B Level 2 Member 2           500
Dimension A Level2 Member1           Dimension B Level 1 Member 1           2000
Dimension A Level2 Member1           Dimension B Level 2 Member 1           1000
Dimension A Level2 Member1           Dimension B Level 2 Member 2           1000
Thanks
Arun

Additional custom level on Time dimension ?

Hi,
I´m very new to OWB, so I don't know if what I want to do is even possible at all.
I created a time dimension using the "Time Dimension Wizard", selecting all possible levels (year, quarter, month, day), but I also need to have one extra level: semester. You see, we need that level for our reports.
I tried to open the mappings that were generated automatically but Oh, boy! does that look complicated!!! Some operators call time functions but when looking them up, they're in packages that come wrapped, so basically I have no clue as to how the data is being generated by Oracle.
Do you know of any way to accomplish this? Basically have a time dimension with the levels:
Year -> Semester -> Quarter -> Month -> Day
Any help would be very much appreciated.
Rgds,
--Oswaldo Santos
[osantos]

Hi JP,
Thanks for the tip.
I created a new "time" dimension manually. I basically made a copy of the attributes and levels of a normal time dimension, plus the new fields for "semester". I also defined the corresponding fields for "END DATE" and "TIME SPAN".
Now, I can populate this dimension, based on a script that someone else posted in this forum. I'm not sure, though, that Oracle OLAP will recognize this as a "time" dimension, will it? I mean, OWB adds some extra fields for a time dimension created with the wizard (like "level type"). Will this affect the performance or behavior of my cubes? Or, can I say that this is as real a time dimension as one created with the wizard in OWB?
Again, thanks a lot for your support.
Regards,
--osvaldo santos.
[osantos]

Correctly configuring attributes of time dimension

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.
Regards,
Elvis Long
TechNet Community Support

Non-additive time dimension

Hi, I have an issue modelling the time dimension for one of our facts (employee counts). The problem is this - when a user says "I want to see the count of employees for a given time period" - what they mean is that they want to see the count of employees as of the last day in that time period. i.e. "June employee counts" means employee counts as of 6/30, "Year 2000" employee counts means as of 12/31/2000.
This is very similar to modelling a "ending balance" inventory type problem in OBIEE.
I've solved this (poorly) in OBIEE by changing the aggregation to use "LAST" for the time dimension and "count(distinct(emplid))" for everything else. This works....but....the performance is horrible. If I ask for employee counts for year 2000, it appears to bring down employee counts for all 365 days in the year, then sorting them by date, then throwing away all except the last date. In other words, it brings back 364 days worth of records and then throws them away. This makes the query perform absolutely terrible. A 2 or 3 second query ends up running for minutes.
Does anyone have a different way to solve this issue?
Thanks,
Scott

Hi Christian - agree completely, I just wish OBIEE were smart enough to do the "last" bit on the 2000 row time dimension instead of the mutli-million rows fact table...
I've thought about trying to materialize the measures, but I have a hidden "twist" on my data. In our fact table, I do NOT write a record for each day for each employee. Instead, I only write a record when something on the employee fact changes. So instead of having a hard "date" column, I instead have a "start date" and "end date", and then need to join to the reporting date dimension using a BETWEEN. I do this because most records stay unchanged for long periods of time, so instead of 365 records per employee per year, I average under 3 records per employee per year.
I may give the multiple fact LTS a try, but truthfully I'm a big believer in simplicity (mainly because I'm lazy....) so was trying to find something easier.
And honestly, I'd use a cube if I could, I'm a (very) old Express wiennie.
Thanks,
Scott

Composite key in Time dimension

Hi All,
I would like to know Time dimension with Composite key. I have a requirement where I want to store 2 Calendars in Time dimension table. for e.g :
for one calendar Weekstarts from SUN-SAT and for another it is from MON-TUE
DateKey Type WeekStart WeekEnd
20140101 1 Sun Sat
20140101 2 Mon Tue
..................etc
I have a measure group which is related to Time dimension (DateKey and Type used a Composite key). This implementation has no issues for additive measures but there are few issues with semi-additive measures (last non-empty,...).
Will composite Key have any effect on semi-additive measures ?
what if i use surrogate key instead of composite key.
Please suggest if the approach has any issue with Time intelligence. Advise if there is any better approach for the same.
Ram MSBI Developer

Hey.. Thanks!
I am clear about the concept about defining annotation based composite key. Also, I read in the documentation that I'll be needing to define as direct, aggregate or one-to-one. But, I am not able to define and run the same in the project mapping xml of toplink.
It would be great if you can share some sample code for defining the same. For e.g. in my mentioned example, there is TestEntity POJO having 'id' as the attribute which gets populated with the testEntityCode of the TestEntityKey POJO. Please suggest the same for the same:
<opm:primary-key>
<opm:attribute-name>id</opm:attribute-name>
<opm:field table="TEST_ENTITY_B" name="TEST_ENT_CODE" xsi:type="opm:column"/>
</opm:primary-key>
Thanks!

Splitting Dimensions on Attributes for reporting

Does anyone have experience or a good idea on how to most efficiently allow splitting a dimension on attributes for reporting custom cells. We are working in 11G. First let me explain
We have a dimension Brand that has a level based hierarchy.
Total
Category
Brand
Item
The Item level has many attributes, of course it has Category and Brand but it also has other Attributes that apply only to the Item level, we will say Flavor and Size for example. The user might want to see a report with Flavors on Columns and Size on rows, or Flavor on columns and Categories on rows.
We have come up with 4 ways to do this, 3 on the fly and 1 predefined.
1. We use the BRAND_VIEW view to limit to the chosen attributes and the Item level then join to the CUBE_VIEW and sum BRAND. This only works for measures with all SUM additively
2. Use the Java API and Source objects to limit BRAND to the ITEMS that meet our criteria, create a custom member in brand and report on it. This gets around the additively problem but is currently not an option til Oracle patches the 11G API to allow session only member creation.
3. Write a DML program to limit the BRANDS and then report on the TOTAL. Again this only works for SUM.
4. For the above example we would build 3 dimensions for BRAND instead of 1. We would build the BRAND dimension as defined and a FLAVOR and SIZE dimension. This increased the size of the build and fact data, also greatly increases the build time. Also this forces the User to see many more dimensions then they are use to seeing.
If anyone has dealt with an issue like this I would greatly appreciate hearing how you handled it.

Clyde, how are you sir? I was curious on this too - so I took a look into it. Seems that the as long as the attributes are marked navigational they come along into the BIA indexes. See excerpt and link below.
[http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw70ehp1/helpdata/en/43/bcf9bfdd052ec5e10000000a11466f/content.htm|http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw70ehp1/helpdata/en/43/bcf9bfdd052ec5e10000000a11466f/content.htm]
Step 1: Creating a BI accelerator index
When you execute this step, the system creates the indexes for the tables of the InfoCube star schema on the BI accelerator server, as long as they have not already been created by other BI accelerator indexes. These tables consist of the fact and dimension tables of the InfoCube as well as the master data tables that contain the required SIDs, the S, X, and Y tables of the InfoObjects
X = time independent navigational attributes and Y = time dependent navigational attributes, so it looks like these are stored too.
Hope this helps!
Justin

Slicer Time Dimension Issue with Cube Functions

Hi,
Hoping someone can help me figure out right approach here.
Summary:
Using Excel 2013 connected to a SSAS cube as data source, and cube functions with slicers to create a dashboard.
Have following time dimension slicers; Fiscal Year, Fiscal Quarter, Fiscal Month, Fiscal Week & Date, that are used to slice data based on user selection, along
with a sales measure.
Below is example of Slicer name and CubeMember function for each:
Slicer_Fiscal_Year:
=CUBEMEMBER("Cube","[Date].[Fiscal Year].&[2015]")
Slicer_Fiscal_Quarter:
=CUBEMEMBER("Cube","[Date].[Fiscal Quarter].[All]")
Slicer_Fiscal_Month:
=CUBEMEMBER("Cube","[Date].[Fiscal Month].&[201408]")
Slicer_Fiscal_Week:
=CUBEMEMBER("Cube","[Date].[Fiscal Week].&[201509]")
Slicer_Date:
=CUBEMEMBER("Cube","[Date].[Date].[All]")
Problem:
What I am trying to do is to build a table with cube functions that takes the lowest grain of the slicer time dimension selected, shows the current member, plus
the prior 7 so I can have an 8 period trending view table that I will build a chart from. In the above example that would mean that it would look at Slicer_Fiscal_Week since that is lowest grain that has an attribute other than All, and then show me the prior
7 periods. In this case 201509 means Week 9, so I would want to show in table Week 9 back to Week 2. But if Slicer_Fiscal_Week was set to All, along with Slicer_Date, then Fiscal Month would be lowest grain, so I would want to show Fiscal Months from August
(201408) back to January 2014. I know how to use CubeRankedMember to pull the value from what is selected in the slicer, the problem is figuring out how to pass the lowest grain time dimension so that I can use lag or some other MDX function to get the previous
periods.
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.
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/></object>

Hello,
Thank you for your question.
I am trying to involve someone familiar with this topic to further look at this issue.
George Zhao
TechNet Community Support
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programs.

Fiscal Year Time Dimension - Month Time Span

I have a need to create a fiscal year time dimension and I created using Time Wizard in OWB. When I was developing BI Reports, I found some inconsistencies in Time dimension as it was showing figures in all the months of my first quarter of new financial year that Apr 2009 – Mar 2010. On close inspection of Time Dimension table I found that fiscal_month_time_span value varies from 35 to 28 to 29 for different months. i.e. it’s not matching with corresponding Calendar month. This means I am unable to plot data correctly using fiscal year dimension.
Maybe this is how it works in Oracle, but this does not solve my problem. Could anyone give me some solution for this ? My Fiscal year is from ‘1- Apr – 09’ to ’31-Mar-10’. In my reports I would like to see transactions for April month when I use month attribute of time dimension like it happens in Calendar time dimension.

May be someone from
Forum: Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition can answer this .
Please post it there.

How to generate a Time Dimension?

Hi,
How can you generate a Time Dimension for both fiscal and calendar year, complete with Month Ago, Quarter Ago, Year Ago, etc Attributes, and then populate with data? Is there any documentation on how to do this?
Thanks

like this?
http://www.ipcdesigns.com/dim_date/index.html

Time Dimension - Additional Attributes..

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