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EPMA Tips and Tricks: Lessons in Metadata and Data Management
Topic: EPM Foundations & Data Management
Owner: Sumit Deo
Date: 2014-06-25
Subtopic: Tips and Techniques

EPMA works very well for average size dimensions and smaller. However, very large dimensions (>30,000+ members) that need to be resorted after automated metadata updates can suffer from long update times when using EPMA and out-of-the-box sorting functionality in the import options. To deal with this limitation, there are different methods that can be employed. One possible method includes updating the EPMA Shared dimension members without reordering the members and then utilizing the Planning Sortmember command line utility. Another method includes “hacking” the Planning tables to allow the use of the ODI Planning adapter to make direct updates to an EPMA Planning application via classic methods. Perhaps a better method exists that builds/baselines the dimension in question with a skeleton hierarchy in the EPMA Shared Library. The skeleton structure would be deployed to Planning tables without deploying to the underlying Essbase cube to prevent data loss. We now have a clean structure, in both EPMA and Planning tables, upon which to build the rest of the dimension. The final result is a fully sorted dimension built in a fraction of the time of using standard EPMA import settings.
Another interesting problem is for dimensions that are manually maintained in EPMA. If new members are not added into the EPMA library and deployed before (automated) data loads that contain these new members are performed, there will be kick-outs from that data load leading to missing data in the application. One novel approach would involve automation that compares existing members in the manually maintained dimension in EPMA against the new data load source and adding any new members identified to a new member “bucket” in the dimension in question. With this method, rejected data would be avoided and the new members can be mapped as they show up in the dimension. We will discuss the above issues and a lot more that we have seen across different project implementations and which mimic the real world problems.


Download File   sdeo.epmatips.pdf

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