Convert Active Reports to Data Mart
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Field Standardization
Each Advanced report built with underlying OLAP reports has a list of field attributes associated with it. Advanced reports often involve one or more individual field rules for each underlying OLAP report. Standardization and re-use of field attributes and field rules is possible, but many organizations find that it is all too easy to duplicate fields. Data Mart, by contrast, encourages business definition standardization and sharing of field attributes since duplication of data fields is much more easily recognizable in the Mart and thus avoidable.
You will not lose the benefits of using Advanced reports under a conversion to Data Mart. You can still schedule Active reports built against the Mart to send to Portal, and still develop them as a Client reporting batch. Report ordering functionality and passing of parameters is the same as when actual OLAP reports underly the Advanced report.
If you implement Data Mart to adopt a reporting tool not supported by Advanced reports, you forego the benefits of Advanced reports related to Portal and Client Reporting.
Data Retrieval Staging versus Data Processing
When you run an Advanced report with underlying OLAPs, all of the underlying processing is done on the fly. Some calculations, especially performance calculations, can be time consuming and lead to long rendering times for reports. With Data Mart as the data source, all computations are completed before reports are run, so that reports simply retrieve field values from one or more tables.
However, if reporting in the organization is a matter of running reports in the overnight cycle and not during normal business hours rather than running reports during the day, Data Mart does not offer as much of a total production time savings.
You can create multiple snapshots allowing you to build and save your data more than once per day and use more than one source rule in the build process. Creating multiple snapshots means an organization could maintain a custodian source and a manager source for the same accounting data. By saving multiple snapshots, you could report on intra-day comparisons of data values.
Potential for Sharing Fields
Your reports share many common fields. Data Mart provides the efficiency of computing each one of them just once rather than once per report. Mart data is meant to be shared among reports. For this reason it is critical to make a careful plan of the data fields in the mart to assure that all reporting needs are covered by a minimum of fields.
Report Conversion
There is no utility that automates report conversion. It is difficult to design such a capability that would be useful in a large number of cases.
An Active reports report sources data from PACE field attributes. Data Mart can store data for the same field attributes with the exception of a short list of field types that Data Mart does not support. Refer to the Data Mart User Guide for additional information. The SQL code used by an Advanced report must be reworked in terms of tables accessed and joins used which changes in a Mart conversion.
However, Eagle Mart, which sources from Data Mart, comes with a set of standard reports including report source code for the non-performance set. These reports provide examples of building Advanced reports against the Mart that may be useful to you during report conversion.
Report Development
The Mart offers efficiencies in report development:
Data Mart simplifies the process of building SQL code for bringing your data together in a report. Data Mart places data fields of multiple types, such as position, performance, and transaction on the same line of a data source table at the group and fund levels of aggregation. This saves you the effort of creating multiple OLAP report rules and profiles and then joining their results in SQL that you must develop.
If you report data using time series, you can do so for some performance fields using the Performance Query Tool. For other types of data, OLAP processes are limiting. Through regular daily or monthly builds, Data Mart establishes a history of all data, making time series reporting easy.
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