Master Data Services - Leaf members Subscription View - sql-server

In MDS, I set up an entity with a simply hierarchy:
MasterGroup
-- SubGroup
---- Product
There are a few other entities, basically functioning as pick-lists for columns on the Product level. I.e. Sales has their way of looking at products, which they split into 5 categories. Finance does the same, but they only want 3 categories.
The product thus looks like the following:
ProductCode (internally generated by MDS)
ProductName
ProductSubGroupValue
LookupProductID (From source system, which lacks these departmental categorization)
FinanceGroupingValue
MarketingGroupingValue
There are about 40 products to be grouped using this hierarchy, with all non-specified products to be dumped into a "catch-all" category.
Everything looks fine, the products have been set up, I can see all the data when I use the Excel MDS plugin, and so I created a view using my Hierarchy to expose the data in SQL Server, and using SSIS I will then source the above columns.
Is this the correct way to set something like this up in MDS, or would you advise me to use a different approach?
Thanks :)

Related

How to write a DAX formula on an RLS SSAS?

I have a data model that is like this:
Joins are done between tables on storenumber and storename.
I would like to give access to the stores staff but they only see the sales of their own store. I added their mail in the table Y2_Stores.
The sales data are in the table Y2_Sales.
In analysis services I added a role "Stores" in read, in Membership I added the email addresses of the stores, on the line filters I put that but I see in the microsoft documentation that it is necessary to make a formula with the functions LOOKUPVALUE() and USERNAME() but I do not know how to build this formula..
I tried this formula in Y2_Sales line:
=Y2_Sales[storenumber]=LOOKUPVALUE(Y2_Stores[storenumber],
Y2_Stores[email], USERNAME(),
Y2_Stores[storenumber],
Y2_Sales[detail_number])
I tried this too:
Y2_Stores[email] = USERPRINCIPALNAME()
Can you help me to write the correct DAX formula?
Thanks a lot
UPDATE :
I added the Y2_StoreEmployee table with storenumber | email and made a relation on storenumber in double direction to the Y2_Stores table :
Relationships:
I created a role with this formula:
There should be a table related to Store, eg StoreEmployee, with (StoreNumber,Email), configured for bidirectional cross filtering with Store. Then the RLS filter filter is on StoreEmployee and is just Email=USERPRINCIPALNAME().
So each user sees only their own rows in StoreEmployee, that creates a filter that propagates to Store, and then to the Sales, Inventory, and Images.

Report with 2 datasets and column groups

I need to create a report that is using 2 datasets. One (yellow) is bringing product data, the other (green) is bringing company and quantity data. They can both be linked using a unique ID field.
One product may be used by up to 8 organisations and each organisation may have multiple departments.
Can someone explain how I can build a report to give the excel output as shown in the image.
I am familiar with lookup in SSRS, but not sure how to use this where groupings are required from the second dataset.

Avoid complex joins in SSRS 2008-r2

I have a report i need to create that has a severe performance problem.
I need to create a catalogue of all courses in our database.
Here is the simplified data model:
Organizational Unit --> contains multiple Courses --> which contains Multiple Activities;
Each activity contains the following:
A list of attached links
A list of prerequisite activities
A list of additional property - value pairs (Cataloging information)
A list of required resource types and quantity for each resource type
A list of Training Objectives
and I wish to create a report that will group everything to look something like that:
After creating the straightforward query which joins all tables together i got almost 6 million rows because of different cartesian products that occur due to joining the activities table with all the 1-many relation table for getting the attached links resources etc...
I was thinking to avoid that in several ways:
sub reports that will list the different lists of items foreach activity.
create an XML field foreach of the described above lists and parse it using VB in my report
use multiple datasets in the report and somehow use lookup functions to list the different values.
Results so far:
sub-report proved to be very inefficient with regards to performance and it took 50% more that what it took with the original 6 million row query.
the xml fields are very efficent DB-wise but it will be trouble to format the data using VB i would very much like to avoid that if possible,
I cannot seem to find the right way to use lookupSet to get a list of attachment names and their links next to them.
so my questions are:
what is the best practice when displaying an entity with a lot of 1-many relations that need to be displayed when dealing with a lot of data and SSRS 2008-r2.
is there a way to join data using lookup function and somehow create "nested tables" that will list 1-many relations
any other suggestion would be very appreciated.
Can you create a drill down report? This looks like a good option to have activities listed and the courses being summarized and then drillable with the detail separated, or similar.
Or you can cache your report if the data change is unimportant?
6m records is a lot for a ssrs report!

Report Model; problem regarding many-to-many relations

I'm having trouble setting up a report model to create reports with report builder. I guess I'm doing something wrong when configuring the report model, but it might also due to change of primary entity in report builder.
I have 3 tables: Client, Address and Product. The Client has PK ClientNumber. The Address and Product both have a FK relation on ClientNumber. The relation between Client and Address is 1-to-many and also between Client and Product:
Product-(many:1)-Client-(1:many)-Address.
I've created a report model (mostly auto generate) with these 3 tables, for each table I've made an Entity.
Now on the Client Entity , I've got 2 roles, Address and Product. They both have a cardinality of 'OptionalMany', because Client can have multiple Addresses or Products. On both Address and Product I have a Client Role with cardinality 'One', because for each Address or Product, there has to be a Client (tried OptionalOne as well...).
Now I'm trying to create a report in Report Builder (2.0) where I select fields from these three entities. I'd like an overview of Clients with their main address and their products, but I don't seem to be able to create a report with fields from both Address and Products in it. I start by selecting attributes from Client, and as soon as I add Product for example the Primary entity changes as if I'm selecting Products (instead of Clients).
This is a basic example of a problem I'm facing in a much more complex model. I've tried lots of different things for 2 days, but I can't get it to work. Does anyone have an idea how to cope with this?
(Using SSRS 2008)
Edit: in T-SQL this is what i mean:
SELECT *
FROM CLIENT
INNER JOIN ADDRESS ON CLIENT.CLIENT_NUMBER = ADDRESS.CLIENT_NUMBER AND ADDRESS.TYPE = 1 --Main Address
INNER JOIN PRODUCT ON CLIENT.CLIENT_NUMBER = PRODUCT.CLIENT_NUMBER
WHERE CLIENT.CLIENT_NUMBER = 1
My experience dates back to Report Builder 1.0, but MS hasn't changed much in their report model since so it probably still applies.
As you mention, you can define many to many relations in the model, but materializing those relations in one tabular report is not possible. Once you chose one of the entities on the many side (Products), you are left without a way to bring data from the other side (Addresses).
You may have some luck with creating a "junction" table (ClientID-AddressID-ProductID) and hidding it from your users like Bob's SQL Reporting Services Blog suggests.
Ultimately this is a big limitation with MS models and it doesn't seem to improve with their latest incarnation Denali BISM many-to-many
I understand the original post is 4 years old and SSRS report models are becoming irrelevant but one solution is to define the OptionalMany relationships as OptionalOne in the model, essentially fooling the model to allow navigation and appropriate query generation.

Activity list ala SO

We are building a set of features for our application. One of which is a list of recent user activities ala on SO. I'm having a little problem finding the best way to design the table for these activities.
Currently we have an Activities table with the following columns
UserId (Id of the user the activity is for)
Type (Type of activity - i.e. PostedInForum, RepliedInForum, WroteOnWall - it's a tinyint with values taken from an enumerator in C#)
TargetObjectId (An id of the target of the activity. For PostedInForum this will be the Post ID, for WroteOnWall this will be the ID of the User whose wall was written on)
CreatedAtUtc (Creationdate)
My problem is that TargetObjectId column doesn't feel right. It's a soft link - no foreign keys and only a knowledge about the Type tells you what this column really contains.
Does any of you have a suggestion on an alternate/better way of storing a list of user activites?
I should also mention that the site will be multilingual, so you should be able to see the activity list in a range of languages - that's why we haven't chosen for instance to just put the activity text/html in the table.
Thanks
You can place all content to a single table with a discriminator column and then just select top 20 ... from ... order by CreatedAtUtc desc.
Alternatively, if you store different type of content in different tables, you can try something like (not sure about exact syntax):
select top 20 from (
select top 20 ID, CreatedAtUtc, 'PostedToForum' from ForumPosts order by CreatedAtUtc
union all
select top 20 ID, CreatedAtUtc, 'WroteOnWalll' from WallPosts order by CreatedAtUtc) t
order by t.CreatedAtUtc desc
You might want to check out http://activitystrea.ms/ for inspiration, especially the schema definition. If you look at that spec you'll see that there is also the concept of a "Target" object. I have recently done something very similar but I had to create my own database to encapsulate all of the activity data and feed data into it because I was collecting activity data from multiple applications with disparate data sources in different databases.
Max

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