Picklists are not a new concept. They exist in many applications, including Web pages. Perhaps you know them as “selection lists” or “drop down lists”. As a refresher, a picklist is a list of valid values for a specific element or cube cell. When you define a picklist for an element or a cell, a…

IBM defines a cube as “…the basic container for data…” and a cube view as “…the definition of how a cube’s dimensions are arranged…”. Planning Analytics cubes can each have multiple views defined and typically, each cube will have specific views designed to assist with common reporting needs. Common Views In addition to defining various…

The modeling workbench was introduced in IBM Planning Analytics and remains available as a beta feature (in 2.0.65). You can now open the modeling workbench from the Planning Analytics Workspace environment (in earlier versions entry was through a separate URL).  You can use the workbench to do almost anything you need to do within a…

Did you know that you can override the standard Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW) theme with your own “custom theme” that reflects your corporate branding or culture? You can use a custom theme to: Modify the colors of the application bar Modify the colors of the navigation bar Set the corporate title that is shown on the home…

IBM Planning Analytics (PA) subsets can be made dynamic by using multi-dimensional expressions (MDX). Doing so allows for automation and will ensure that subsets update if the dimension changes.  MDX allows for many different use cases such as filtering by attributes, levels or using a wildcard search to display all elements that meet a specific…

TurboIntegrator (TI) processes in IBM Planning Analytics (PA) allow connections to various data. One option is an ODBC connection, which stands for Open Database Connectivity. This is an extremely reliable method that directly connects to an external relational database and allows you to extract data through a query. This article explains how ODBC username and…

Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW) comes with the feature to create multiple hierarchies in one dimension. These hierarchies are generally created by the attributes of the dimension. Once a hierarchy is created, it is detached from the attribute values. Therefore, a developer should create a TI (TurboIntegrator) process to maintain the hierarchies which are built based…

An earnings call is one of the most important meetings between the management team of a public company and its external stakeholders. The company prepares internal and external reports like an annual business disclosure report (10-K) every quarter. The typical timeframe for collecting data and producing the earnings-related documents is less than 60 days. That…