Some time back I answered a question on BOB that asked:
How can I copy a context?
There are a number of reasons why you might want to do this. In a semi-complex universe you might have a bunch of snowflake tables and a series of fact tables. After building the first context, the second (third, fourth…) are essentially the same but with a different fact table. As far as I know there is no way to copy / paste a context, but there is a fairly simple way to source a new context from an existing one. Here’s what I do: Continue reading “How To Copy a Context”
The other day I was talking to someone about contexts in a universe and they offered the typical response. You probably know the one… it says that you should set up one context per fact table. If you read many posts on BOB then you’ll see that phrase quoted quite a bit. The question is: Is this the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?
No, it is not.
Continue reading “Is “One Context Per Fact Table” a True Statement?”
A few days ago I finally got started on what will become a series of posts about fan and chasm traps. The post was “Do I Have a Fan Trap?” and it included a definition of a fan trap in a universe and showed a basic solution. However, it also mentioned that the basic solution would not work in most cases, and that contexts would be required for a more complete solution. If you are new to the Universe Designer, or even if you just have not worked with contexts that much, the first step is understanding exactly what a context does for you. That is what I hope to do with this post.
Continue reading “What Is a Context Anyway?”
The full client applications (Business Objects aka Desktop Intelligence) have had VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) for quite some time. The initial release of 4.x included a scripting language that was “like” VBA but was not quite the same. When 5.x was introduced they switched to Microsoft VBA. I have written more than a few VBA utilities over the years, some of which are published on the Integra Solutions library page. Today I want to share a utility that I put together to help migrate universes in a Teradata environment. I should point out that this utility does not require that you use Teradata; it can be used in any database environment where you need to do a mass-update to the owner or schema name.
Executive Summary
This utility is designed to automate the update of the schema or owner name in a universe. The host application is Microsoft Excel since the Universe Designer application cannot be a VBA host. You enter the “From” and “To” schema names into cells in the XLS and run the macro. At completion you will have a universe where the schema (or owner) has been updated.
Continue reading “Using the Designer SDK to Ease Migrations”
I started to write this a long time ago, but a few things (okay, lots of things) got in the way. I did manage to write a brief introduction a while back but that’s as far as it got. So today I want to write at least a little bit more about fan traps in particular.
Continue reading “Do I Have a Fan Trap?”
One of the most frequent questions that comes out of either the “building reports” or “universe design” areas on BOB has to be: how can I get rid of the time on my date prompts? And it’s not a new question; I bet if I searched I could find the same questions dating all the way back to 1998, which are the oldest posts we have on the board.
The overwhelming complaint generally boils down to, “… but my users don’t like it.” I get that, certainly I do. But to be honest it’s easier to spend an hour or two of your time 😉 convincing the users that it is more cost effective to leave it than to try to change the way the tool works. It’s not worth the time to remove the time when it works perfectly fine if you ignore it.
Normally I am all about trying to figure out a creative solution and do the “outside of the box” thinking. People that know me understand that one of the best ways to motivate me to solve an issue is to say something along the lines of “… and Business Objects said it can’t be done.” Well, then I have to do it. 😆 But not in this case.
Continue reading “Making the Best Use of Your Time (in a Prompt)”
Better, Faster, Cheaper?
Shortcut joins seem to be one of the more misunderstood features of Designer. They should not be used to resolve loops; that is not their function. They are supposed to be used to take shortcuts, thus the name. 🙂 They can make your queries faster, certainly, as they allow you to drop tables from the query. But there are limits as to how they can be used.
As a designer I almost always wait to the last step (or nearly so) to add shortcut joins. Here is the most important point about shortcut joins, in my opinion: If a universe isn’t working without them, adding shortcut joins does not fix any problems. In fact, it may only make them worse. I covered shortcut joins in a fairly detailed fashion in my most recent conference presentation. I am working on a series of posts to supplement the presentation slides and those will hopefully be ready soon.
For the past several years I have included notes about the JOIN_BY_SQL parameter now available for universe designers. The short definition: instead of documents having multiple SQL passes with a join or synchronize option, this parameter asks the database to do the work instead. I have stated in more than one presentation that we saw major performance improvements by using this feature. Now I have to back-track on that just a bit. 🙂
Continue reading “JOIN_BY_SQL Revisited”
What is Index Awareness?
The first topic that I covered in my “Tales From a Universe Ninja” presentation at the 2007 Insight Americas conference was Index Awareness. I have to admit, this would probably not have been my first choice for a topic. I covered it on request from a member of the Universe Designer product team. As I went through this feature I found that much of what I remembered was still true even in XI R2. But I also found that in the right environment this feature could really help.
If you have downloaded a copy of my presentation then I am going to cover slides 10 through 16 in this blog post. Future blog posts will cover the rest of the material from the presentation. I believe that this feature was introduced in version 6.5 which means you must be at least at that version to be able to consider using it.
This feature is defined in the Universe Designer help file as follows:
Object keys allow Universe Designer to generate more efficient SQL by filtering on primary key values and eliminating unnecessary joins.
That’s great, but what does it mean?
Continue reading “Index Awareness Part I: The Basics”
The @Select() function adds a lot of flexibility as long as it is used properly. When to use it (and when not to use it) is probably a future blog post (or perhaps even more than one 😆 ). But one of the things that I don’t care for is the fact that when I do use it, the referenced code is embedded within extra parenthesis. It turns out there is a way to change that behavior.
Continue reading “Universe Parameter: Eval Without Parenthesis”
