Comments on: Universe Design Best Practices

By: Dan Zhao

Dan Zhao — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:24:43 +0000

Thanks for the greate post, indeed usefull.

By: BO

BO — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:14:23 +0000

Great work! thanks.

By: BO Universe Design Best Practices « Davydd's Business Intelligence

BO Universe Design Best Practices « Davydd's Business Intelligence — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:06:46 +0000

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By: David Marks

David Marks — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 03:54:57 +0000

Nice work. Some discussion should be made about business logic best practices related to a universe and the best place for this. The report, the universe, the data foundation (eii), views, and/or the database (ETL). Or perhaps that is a new topic.

By: Jansi

Jansi — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 08:36:28 +0000

Locking the universe on import feature to control the export of the Universe to the Repository can also be added.

By: Timo Elliott

Timo Elliott — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:51:33 +0000

Nice list… Number (1) is the biggest by far.

All too often, I discuss a Universe design with the designer and they have no idea what I’m talking about — they’re comfortable with the tables, and they’ve been asked to build reports — what’s all the fuss about? (this even applies, sadly, to some of the Universes supplied with BusinessObjects itself)…

I’d specifically expand on a combination of (1) and (7), and mention that Universe designers often stay too close to the (optimized) table structure — for example, with a single “objects” that refers to multiple different business things. If there are several business concepts stored in a single table, you should make multiple aliases and use one for each object.

Also — I’ve been arguing for years that BusinessObjects should have a script that checks for some of these things (maximum number of objects in a table, max number of classes, etc.), tied to a button called “validate best practice” or something like that, within the Designer Module. Anybody every see anything like that? I heard rumors of it being used by some BI competency centers…

“BI Questions” blog: http://timoelliott.com

By: James

James — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:58:40 +0000

great post Josh, useful and concise. how about contexts? we find our customers don’t fully understand what these do, or what practical uses they have. the guys in our office were blown away when we created contexts allowing them to compare monthly, yearly and historic sales figures in the same report….

By: Andreas

Andreas — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 13:43:17 +0000

I am additonally recommending:

- Use ANSI92 compliant SQL (universe parameter) as well as setting JOIN_BY_SQL parameter to yes.
- All ratios should be set as database delegated/smart measures.

- Generic time objects for Today, Yesterday, This Month, Last Month etc. should be provided (as dimension objects as well as filters).

- As a rule of thumb do not use the WHERE clause in any measure, dimension, or detail object. Use CASE WHEN … SQL syntax instead.

By: Suhel

Suhel — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:51:53 +0000

Josh

This was very usefull, not much like this on the web. Please email me when you have done your next post.

Regards

Suhel