Introduction This guide contains information that can be useful if you are working with cube data in TIBCO Spotfire®. Child Topics:What is a Cube?An OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) cube is a multi-dimensional representation of data. What are Measures? Measures is a general name for measurements, metrics or facts which are of interest in the data analysis. Measures are mostly numerical in nature. Examples of measures are sales, quantity, accounts, and so on. What is a Dimension?Dimensions organize the data in relation to an area of interest. Dimensions can be things like customers, stores, or geographies, and they are usually hierarchical in nature. What is a Hierarchy?A hierarchy defines a set of parent-child relationships. Typically, a parent member belongs to a more general concept than its children and the parent member "summarizes" its children. Parent members can further be aggregated as the children of other parents. Cube QueriesWhen working with in-database cube data, Spotfire creates MDX (MultiDimensional eXpression) queries that are sent to the cube query engine to get results back. Large OLAP Hierarchies in SpotfireWhen you are analyzing external cube data in Spotfire, you may encounter situations when a hierarchy filter takes a really long time to load, or even fails to load. This happens because the filter is populated in advance by reading the hierarchy outline from the cube. If the hierarchy is large (with many different levels and categories), the loading of all values at once may even cause problems for the cube data source itself. Common Operations on Cubes and their Spotfire EquivalentSome common operations on cubes have a corresponding action in the Spotfire environment. Combining OLAP Data and Other Data in the Same AnalysisHierarchy values in a cube have both a caption and key. The key will always be unique, but the caption can be the same as for another hierarchy value. The key can be used for identifying a value. When you visualize data from an in-database cube in Spotfire, you may encounter cases where you cannot separate multiple instances of a value from each other (for example, when there are more than one city in the world with the same name (i.e., caption), like the case with Paris, France and Paris, Texas) in a visualization. In that case, you probably want to match values based on the keys, rather than on the values themselves. This is done by selecting the KeyOf method on the matching column of the cube directly. HomeIntroduction
Introduction This guide contains information that can be useful if you are working with cube data in TIBCO Spotfire®. Child Topics:What is a Cube?An OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) cube is a multi-dimensional representation of data. What are Measures? Measures is a general name for measurements, metrics or facts which are of interest in the data analysis. Measures are mostly numerical in nature. Examples of measures are sales, quantity, accounts, and so on. What is a Dimension?Dimensions organize the data in relation to an area of interest. Dimensions can be things like customers, stores, or geographies, and they are usually hierarchical in nature. What is a Hierarchy?A hierarchy defines a set of parent-child relationships. Typically, a parent member belongs to a more general concept than its children and the parent member "summarizes" its children. Parent members can further be aggregated as the children of other parents. Cube QueriesWhen working with in-database cube data, Spotfire creates MDX (MultiDimensional eXpression) queries that are sent to the cube query engine to get results back. Large OLAP Hierarchies in SpotfireWhen you are analyzing external cube data in Spotfire, you may encounter situations when a hierarchy filter takes a really long time to load, or even fails to load. This happens because the filter is populated in advance by reading the hierarchy outline from the cube. If the hierarchy is large (with many different levels and categories), the loading of all values at once may even cause problems for the cube data source itself. Common Operations on Cubes and their Spotfire EquivalentSome common operations on cubes have a corresponding action in the Spotfire environment. Combining OLAP Data and Other Data in the Same AnalysisHierarchy values in a cube have both a caption and key. The key will always be unique, but the caption can be the same as for another hierarchy value. The key can be used for identifying a value. When you visualize data from an in-database cube in Spotfire, you may encounter cases where you cannot separate multiple instances of a value from each other (for example, when there are more than one city in the world with the same name (i.e., caption), like the case with Paris, France and Paris, Texas) in a visualization. In that case, you probably want to match values based on the keys, rather than on the values themselves. This is done by selecting the KeyOf method on the matching column of the cube directly. HomeIntroduction