Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

I don’t like outer joins in my reporting universes. Never have. Sure, if I am creating a universe against an application system I might consider using outer joins because of the normalized nature of the data. But if I am reporting against a warehouse schema of some kind, I really prefer to use inner joins. That way I avoid any potential performance issues caused by outer joins, but more importantly I avoid questions about report data. That being said, outer joins do have a specific purpose, and if I need to use them in my universe I certainly can.

One of the biggest challenges with outer joins (other than potential performance issues) is explaining to a user why their query results changed because they added a condition to their query. Remember that users don’t (typically) look at the SQL, so they won’t know that I have created an outer join. It can be confusing. Fortunately I have options as to how my outer joins are executed, so once I determine their usage requirements I can change the way my universe behaves.

Defining the Problem

For this post I will am going to use a very simple universe with only three tables, shown here.

This universe joins a customer to an order, and an order to order lines. In my database I have one customer that does not yet have any orders. If I run a query against the current universe structure, this new customer will not show up. My requirement is to show all customers, whether they have orders or not. This must be true even if I put a condition on the order table. That’s where it gets tricky. 🙂 Continue reading “Handling Conditions on Outer Joins”

There have been a number of posts recently in the Semantic Layer forum on BOB about shortcut joins. When will they be used? How many can be used? Why won’t this particular shortcut get used? Do I have to add shortcuts to contexts? Lots of questions.

I am going to try to clear up a couple of those questions now. First here is a summary of everything I need to know about shortcuts:

• Shortcut joins do not provide an alternate path.
• Shortcut joins do provide a shorter path.

By the end of this post I hope that the reader will understand the difference between those two statements. There are two rules for how and when a shortcut will be applied:

• A shortcut join will only be used if it eliminates tables from the query.
• A shortcut join is applied after the SQL has been generated (meaning after a context selection has been made, if required).

I will talk about these two items as well. But first, how do I create a shortcut join in my universe? Continue reading “Everything About Shortcut Joins”