How to easily replace a table with another, when you have table dependencies

By -
You're happy. The new MicroStrategy project is finally ready. You spent some time building attributes, facts, metrics and all the other necessary objects. But the same day, you receive an email from the database team announcing some table names changes. You are a bit disappointed for a moment, but then you remember there's an easy way to make these changes even if you have a ton of dependent objects based on those tables. The solution is right there and you're happy that you're going to fix it in seconds.

  1. Open Architect
  2. Identify (under Project Tables View) the table whose name has changed in the underlying database
  3. Select it and check the properties on the right
  4. Modify the name of the table under Definition -> Database Name and hot ENTER
  5. Acknowledge when metadata change has been made
  6. Set the same table name for the logical entry under Definition -> Name
  7. Save and update the schema
  8. Repeat steps 1 to 7 for as many tables you need

For this solution to be a success, you need to make sure that all the used fields in the dependent objects are still there in the new table.


You're done!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The count distinct adventure - Part I

By -
Image
I've been working with several reporting and data analysis tools for a while now. Started with SSAS cubes, then Business Objects came along, later, MicroStrategy (MSTR) joined the team and then Tableau. They all have their own ways of managing count distinct (CD), but they yet have more in common. Manage simply means yielding the good results every time a user interacts with that CD measure. Us, the BI tech guys, we have a goal to facilitate easy data analysis to the users, especially that most of them work in non-IT domains and have different skill levels. Throughout time, CDs have proved to be a difficult thing to manage and if it wasn't the ease of implementation, it was the performance impact we soon discovered. It's been known that the difficulty lies in the nature of this non-additive measure. Basically, we cannot sum it as a standard revenue measure, but you always have to re-calculate it when the level of the aggregation changes. Have to admit that I like a goo...
Read more

The count distinct adventure - Part II

By -
During the first part of the topic we introduced the challenge of count distinct and 2 solutions to address them, along with their advantages and disadvantages. The list of solutions continues in this final section and these, presented below, are also the solutions that we use across our projects where CDs are required. Solution 3 - Count Distinct derived metrics This functionality is probably the most known by the users and mostly used, as it offers flexibility and the necessary control without the intervention of the IT teams. Creating =derived metrics in reports, Vis and documents is a walk In the park, using the context menus. With the deployment of V10, things got even more flexible adding support for conditional derived metrics (IF and CASE) by using attributes directly. As you probably remember, or still use today, up until V10, building conditional derived metrics was a hustle, as only metrics could be used with IF and CASE statements. You would first create a MAX(<...
Read more

The surrogate key strikes back

By -
If you ever participated in building a data warehouse or worked around data warehouses, you've probably came across the surrogate key (SK) notion. If you’re not familiar, then take a look at this article on the Kimball's group website. Surrogate keys are very common in data warehouses and they bring a lot of functionality, from design to performance enhancements. Now, one of the surrogate key's drawbacks is the difficulty to keep it in synch between all environments. As each environment can be linked to a different version of the source (e.g. UAT, live environments etc.), surrogate keys can get off for the same natural key and this can also have an effect in MicroStrategy. When building attributes you have to define its forms. The ID form should contain a unique key describing the attribute in order to provide correct joining, aggregation and attribute member list when applying filters. Indeed the surrogate key doesn’t have any business meaning, so this form w...
Read more