Time Period using Days

[arunrajb]

When i go to create time profile, i can see Months and weeks. Is there any documentation available how to create days?

[JackLacava · Accepted solution]

Daily applications are technically a Bad Idea, since you will have significant data-explosion challenges, as well as others (leap years...). OneStream doesn't allow for days in the Time Dimension by default, but there are ways to accommodate the requirement anyway. There are three main strategies:

• The most common approach is to dedicate a UD dimension to represent days (D1, D2, etc). This is pretty flexible and fairly intuitive, although it will require some discipline in your rule-writing.
• A more custom approach is to keep custom tables where daily data is stored, which is then aggregated when loaded to the actual cube. You can then use various data-blending strategies to report or drillback.
• A more hacker approach is to "fake it" by creating a Custom Time Dimension where each "week" is actually a day. It's up to you how to organize it (52 "months" per year, or the traditional 12 months per year with each of them containing 28, 30, or 31 "weeks" as necessary), but you can't do it through the interface; you will have to create a basic file with System -> Tools / Time Dimensions, then open it with a text editor to turn it into what you want (the format is very simple).
  A drawback of this approach is that the Time Profiles page will only allow you to modify up to 16 months and 96 weeks, so if you need to play with those (very likely - you'll want as few Scenarios as possible using daily data, for performance reasons), again you will have to export them with Load/Extract and then hack the XML. There might be other corners of the interface that don't play well with it, although basic ones (like the Member Filter Builder) should be ok.

[JackLacava · Accepted solution]

Daily applications are technically a Bad Idea, since you will have significant data-explosion challenges, as well as others (leap years...). OneStream doesn't allow for days in the Time Dimension by default, but there are ways to accommodate the requirement anyway. There are three main strategies:

• The most common approach is to dedicate a UD dimension to represent days (D1, D2, etc). This is pretty flexible and fairly intuitive, although it will require some discipline in your rule-writing.
• A more custom approach is to keep custom tables where daily data is stored, which is then aggregated when loaded to the actual cube. You can then use various data-blending strategies to report or drillback.
• A more hacker approach is to "fake it" by creating a Custom Time Dimension where each "week" is actually a day. It's up to you how to organize it (52 "months" per year, or the traditional 12 months per year with each of them containing 28, 30, or 31 "weeks" as necessary), but you can't do it through the interface; you will have to create a basic file with System -> Tools / Time Dimensions, then open it with a text editor to turn it into what you want (the format is very simple).
  A drawback of this approach is that the Time Profiles page will only allow you to modify up to 16 months and 96 weeks, so if you need to play with those (very likely - you'll want as few Scenarios as possible using daily data, for performance reasons), again you will have to export them with Load/Extract and then hack the XML. There might be other corners of the interface that don't play well with it, although basic ones (like the Member Filter Builder) should be ok.

[arunrajb]

Thanks, Jack, for sharing the info. How about 13th period? is it possible to add 13th period? or do we need to take similar approach to have UD dimension to park the data?

[JackLacava · Accepted solution]

Yes, even without any hacking you can have 13 periods per year. How to achieve that will depend on your business case - if it's just a one-off, you can use a Scenario with a Range; if it's for the entire app, you can create a custom Time Dimension with the wizard, save it, then use it when creating the new app. You can find this in the guide if you search for "Time Dimensions".