The overall purpose of a data warehouse is to integrate corporate data from various internal- and external data sources. Data is collected over time and stores historical events that are often not persisted in the source systems and is also commonly referred to as the single version of the truth, making the data warehouse an…
Data Staging
The data staging area is a temporary location for data between the source systems and the data warehouse. This is where source data is copied to in the extract phase of ETL and is the first integration point for data coming from multiple source systems. This is also where the majority of data cleansing and…
Data Lineage Diagrams
Most data warehouse developers have experienced the challenge of answering a common question like “what data source fields are we using for this measure?” and sometimes you can even add “and what are we doing to it in the ETL process?” If you are one of the many, that either do not have complete end…
CubeStore
- Is a secure Cloud-based distribution platform that supports reuse of projects. The CubeStore enables you to reuse your projects as project templates that can be downloaded directly into timeXtender. Once a solution has been downloaded, it can be up and running within hours, and can be customized and extended. Visit CubeStore
Documentation – Full Printable
- Fully automated generation of Documentation, including full version control to ensure that the generated documentation corresponds to the deployed version of the project. Comments can be added to all elements in the project. The template can be modified and the documentation comes as a hyperlinked PDF document. The documentation is valid for IT Audit…
Trace
Complete trace of a single entity within the Meta model. Trace between the cube and data source(s). See [Data Lineage Diagrams]
Data Quality
- Enforcement of implicit and explicit primary- and foreign key constraints. – Enforcement of threshold values. – Row or value based checkpoints and notifications.
Automated Performance Optimization
- Hash-bytes – Compressions: supports row-and table based compression on both staging and data warehouse. Implemented automatically based on table classification. Can be manually configured in advance mode.
Indexes
tX2012 supports both automatic created indexes as well as rich capabilities to add your own non clustered indexes to fine tune the load performance of your data warehouse platform. Automatic indexes are added based on table classification such as dimension/fact/large/normal and transformations done on a table, to ensure well performing code out of the box.…
Lookups
One of the most commonly features of tX2012 is the ability to look up a value across tables using a simple drag and drop interface. Lookups can be used to perform both simple tasks as fetching a single value from a related table based on one or more joined fields, but also in more complex…
Move Projects As XML Between Installations
- Move or copy an entire solution between installations, customers, or environments. – Works across different SQL Server versions and editions.
Time Dimensions
The most common of all dimensions is time, since there is virtually no reporting or analysis done without the context of when. A time or calendar dimension can always be derived of source data, as any other dimension. Additionally you can also take advantage of the time table and time dimension features in tX2012 to…
Work Items
Work Items is a check in/check out feature that is used to keep track of who is working on which objects in a multiple concurrent developers scenario. It helps prevent conflicting changes. Note that Work Items is not a lock/unlock mechanism and it doesn’t prevent conflicts. You can also use Work Items in a single…
Uploading QuickCubes Projects to The CubeStore
You can now protect and upload projects to the CubeStore directly from the timeXtender client. Note that this feature requires a license that contains the Protect Project feature. You access Upload to CubeStore from the Partner Menu. To upload a project to the CubeStore Protect the project by specifying a project ID. If it is…
MDX Calculation Scripts
MDX Calculation Scripts allows you to add MDX outside of the measure context. This makes it easier to add elements such as members, sets and scopes to the cubes. Technically, the calculation scripts are placed in the CALCULATE; area right after the calculated measures. Calculation Scripts Example In earlier timeXtender versions, the calculated measure script…
Markup Scripts
Markup scripts are parameterized scripts that can be used for custom selection rules, transformations, custom views, user defined functions, stored procedures, calculated measures, SQL scripts, and OLAP scripts. The main purpose of markup scripts is to avoid scripts that break when objects are renamed. If the script is reusable, we recommend that you use SQL…
Managed IBM iSeries DB2 Provider Support
Support for iSeries Access OleDB and .NET wrapped/managed OleDB has been added to support iSeries version 5.3 and later. This means that DataDirect is no longer supported for iSeries. However, it will still be used for zOS based DB2 databases. The managed iSeries DB2 connector has been added to handle extraction from legacy versions of…
Incremental Load
Improved Performance Target-Based Incremental Load. To improve load performance for very large tables, a feature called Target-based Incremental Load was introduced with timeXtender version 4.5. This feature controls how data is inserted, updated, and deleted between the raw and valid table instances. The Target-based Incremental Load feature is especially useful in scenarios where the source…
Geography and Geometry Datatype Support
timeXtender now supports the spatial data types Geography and Geometry. You can use these data types in some cube frontend tools and some data warehouse reporting tools such as Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. CTP2 Note: When you copy a table from the staging database to a data warehouse, the datatype for Geography fields is…
Force Unicode Conversion of SQL Server Sources
When you add a SQL Server data source, it is now possible to select a Force Unicode Conversion option. This results in a conversion of all fields on the staging area to Unicode. This feature is useful when a SQL Server data source consists of additional data sources. The Force Unicode Conversion box must be…
Support for Multiple Concurrent Developers
In timeXtender 2012, we have added enhanced support for multiple concurrent developers. In previous versions, when you opened a project that was already opened by another user, a warning was displayed and you were asked whether you wanted to take over the lock-privilege of the project. This prevented the other user from saving the project.…
Slowly Changing Dimensions
Slowly changing dimensions type 1 and 2 is a key to Kimball style dimensional modeling and is of course supported in tX2012 with an easy to use interface, that allows implementation within minutes – without any SQL knowledge required. The tX2012 implementation further includes the use of hashed values for better performance on large dimensions.…