Question: What is best practice for business rules? Is it a better approach to attach them to the cube and run as part of the consolidation or is it better for them to run through a data management sequence?

Answer

When applying best practice for business rules, the first step is to make sure you understand what the purpose of the business rules are…

Are they rules that facilitate calculations…or, perhaps execute a specific series of logical expressions?

This will help in defining the best way to apply the rules within your Onstream Application. 

Due to OneStream's multithreading capabilities it is preferred to write the logic against the members themselves.

OneStream prefers that single rules file not to be leveraged when possible.

Multithreading, allows for the simultaneous calculation of multiple members at once. This is most efficient.

Cons of Single Rules files:

Single rule files can be complicated and difficult to follow.

OneStream will not be able to facilitate multithreading when a single file is utilized.

As far as seeding rules go, this can be addressed in a number of ways and you will want to discuss with your client specifics to their use case to define the best approach to take.

One method is to leverage the custom calculate functionality.

This is a specific finance business rule, that essentially generates an on-demand calculation.

This can be then run via a data management job or a custom button on a dashboard.

This optimizes performance because you’re not calculating the entire cube or running through any other business logic and just purely executing the specific logic you’ve defined.