Business Intelligence Tutorial

Lesson 26. Setting properties

In this lesson, you will explore the properties of dimensions and members, and change one of the properties of a member of the Accounts dimension. These properties control how the Essbase outline is built in the OLAP application. You will also examine special properties of the Accounts dimension.

Setting dimension properties

1. On the Set Dimensions Properties page, notice how the properties of the dimension are displayed to the right of the dimension name.
   
   The fields in white are properties of the dimension that you can change. These properties affect all the members of a dimension.

   Storage

   Dimensions can be either Dense or Sparse. A Dense dimension is likely to contain data for every combination of dimension members, for example, the Time dimension. A Sparse dimension has a low probability that data exists for every combination of dimension members, for example, the Product or Market dimensions.

   Data Storage

   This property determines how and when data values are stored for a member. For example, you can store the value (the default), dynamically calculate and store the value, indicate that a member is shared between dimensions, and so on.

   Two Pass Calc

   Calculations are performed from the bottom up, from child values to parent values. The values of some child members might depend on parent values, requiring two calculations.

   Alias

   You can assign an alias name to the dimension.

   UDAs

   You can create a user-defined attribute (UDA) for the dimension.

2. Click Next and the Set Member Properties page is displayed.

Setting member properties

In this exercise you will change a property for a dimension member.

1. Notice how the properties of the member are displayed to the right of the member name. The fields in white are properties of the dimension that you can change:

   Data Storage

   This property determines how and when data values are stored for a member. For example, you can store the value (the default), dynamically calculate and store the value, indicate that a member is shared between dimensions, and so on.

   Two Pass Calc

   Calculations are performed from the bottom up, from child values to parent values. The values of some child members might depend on parent values, requiring two calculations.

   Consolidation

   This property determines how child values are rolled up to parents. The default is a plus sign (+), which means the child values are added to the parent value.

   Alias

   You can assign an alias name to the dimension.

   UDA

   You can create a user-defined attribute (UDA) for the dimension.

2. On the Set Member Properties page, you can change some of the properties for individual members that you previously set for the entire dimension, plus one that is unique to members. Under the Dimension heading, click the Accounts dimension. Notice that the members are displayed in the Member List field.
3. Under the Data Storage heading, click the value in the Consolidation column for the MISC member. A list box button opens in the cell. Change the property to a minus sign (-).
   
   Now, when the values in the Misc member are rolled up into the Accounts dimension, the Misc values will be subtracted, not added.
4. Click Next and the Set Accounts Properties page is displayed.

Examining account properties

In this exercise you will examine special properties for members of the accounts dimension:

1. On the Set Account Properties page, you can change the following properties for members of the Accounts dimension:

   Time Balance

   This property defines how a member's parent is calculated in the Time dimension. The parent can represent the value of the first member. The default value of None allows an existing calculation associated with the member to determine the parent. Other values include First (the first value in a time period), Last (the last value in a time period), or Average (an average of all the values in the time period).

   Skip

   This property determines whether to skip a member when calculating a parent.

   Variance Reporting

   In Variance Reporting, the difference between budget and actual data is calculated.

   
   
   
2. For the Accounts dimension, you can set these properties for each member:
3. Click Next and the Name Filters page is displayed.

What you just did

In this lesson, you explored the properties of dimensions and members, and changed one of the properties of a member of the Accounts dimension. You also examined special properties of the Accounts dimension.