A better solution to an old problem

* Small Team of senior DW/BI consultants with typically 15 + years in the industry * Oracle/Hyperion BI /Cognos / MS-BI * Data Warehousing Architects and Modellers * Platform agnostic * Agile Project Management * Feel free to ping us for advice at dimensions.biz * Come stump us!!

* Planning is done in Data Forms which mimic spreadsheet layouts. * Real estate in the data form is limited. Any dimension modeled as row can become unwieldy to use * Example: Planning costs and income for apartments in an apartment complex. * A typical layout might be the apartment units as rows and the driver accounts as columns * Admins and those with a larger amount of properties could have 1000s of rows to budget/plan to * Depending on the hierarchy of dimension in question, there is no easy way to filter rows to a manageable size

* Use Planning Security to limit rows * Using security settings and suppressing N/A and #missing rows, row count is reduced to a manageable size per user * Does not apply to admin or regional/manager level users * Desired security grouping is often not conducive for proper hierarchical suppression.

* Split a dimension * Split the row dimension into two separate hierarchies (e.g., apartment units & apartment complex) * Have one new dimension be flat (e.g., Apartment Complex) * Data is loaded at intersection of units belonging to a complex (i.e., using P-C to load to two dimensions). * Flat dimension becomes POV filter

* Creates sparse cube because correct data only at specific apartment/complex intersections * Allows for accidental entry of nonsense data (i.e., at apartments not physically in complex data was entered for). * Since suppress is used, apartments w/out data are not visible in form * Bad design because it splits two dimensions

* New in System 9 * New to associate with Forms in System 11 * Not the same as Global Variables (BR Prompts), but used in conjunction with. * Seemed redundant or useless like Dynamic Calc & Store * Set in user preferences for each user.

* Create a Planning User Variable (E.g., MyBuilding, MyProject) * End-User will need to assign a value to variable in Planning Preferences (tab: User Variable Options) at first-time use. * Associated Planning User Variable with the Form of interest in the POV tab (enable Dynamic User Variables). * To use seamlessly in Business Rules, create Global Variable (BR Prompt) PROJUser in EAS and enter default value &MyProject (reference Planning Variable in Global Variable). * Rows return are always 0-level of select value. * May select any node in hierarchy. * User preference is stored to reflect last selected value; this is user specific. * Business Rule can be run on save and will pass value in so user is not prompted again.

* Form loads faster because only children of selected member are loaded. Suppression of #missing loads form with all rows and then filters. * More correctly models reality and therefore prevents possibility of nonsense data and/or sparse cubes. * Allows viewing of meta data (e.g., apartments) without data loaded to them * Can be used seamlessly with Business Rules.

* Now I show you how it looks like …