Posts by agoddard
How Do I Diagnose and Resolve Performance Issues in Planning Analytics for Excel (PAfE)?
IBM Planning Analytics for Microsoft Excel – or PAfE (previously referred to as PAX) – is a Microsoft Excel-based tool that report authors use to build sophisticated, multiple-sheet, multiple-query reports against multiple databases, including Planning Analytics models. If you are a PAfE user, or support a group of PAfE users, you may eventually need to…
Read MoreHow Do I Upload Data Files to IBM Planning Analytics Cloud for Use in My Models and Reports?
Planning Analytics (PA) is a great platform for building models, such as workforce planning, revenue planning, and capital expenditure. These models require data from other systems. The cloud version of PA provides many data integration methods. However, a flat file is still useful when other data integration methods are not possible. To upload a file…
Read MoreHow Do I Use the RunProcess Command to Shorten Data Processing Time in IBM Planning Analytics?
We process more and more data every day. Some processing tasks take a few minutes while others take more than a few hours. The length of processing time depends on the amount of data, the speed of hardware, and how we process data. The first two factors are usually fixed for a given scenario so…
Read MoreHow do you use one title dimension selection to control another dimension’s subset in a PAW cube view?
A useful feature of building a cube view in Planning Analytics Workspace is the availability of using MDX to control dimension element selections. This functionality can be leveraged to use the selection made in one title element drive what element a separate dimension uses. In this article I have two examples. The first is using…
Read MoreHow Do I Use Hash Values in Planning Analytics to Detect Changes and Improve Data Processing?
When working with IBM Planning Analytics, it is not uncommon to source data from a relational data source. Typically, you will see a Data Warehouse or Data Lake where data is transformed and loaded on a schedule using an ETL tool. ETL, which stands for Extract, Transform and Load, extracts data from a source, modifies it in some…
Read MoreHow Do I Use Conditional Feeders in IBM Planning Analytics to Create More Efficient Feeding Logic?
One of IBM Planning Analytics (PA) biggest advantages over other applications is the ability to use feeders. When it comes to issues of sparsity within cubes, feeders improve performance by giving developers a way to prevent Planning Analytics from trying to look through millions of intersections to find all the data to consolidate. Essentially, feeders…
Read MoreHow Do I Use the SQL Server OFFSET-FETCH Feature in IBM Planning Analytics to Page Query Results?
The OFFSET-FETCH filter is a SQL combination designed so that you can specify how many rows you want to skip before specifying how many rows you want to return in a SQL query. This can come in handy in a variety of ways such as returning results to the user one “slice” at a time…
Read MoreWhen should you feed from string cells in IBM Planning Analytics?
While developing an IBM Planning Analytics (PA) model, you may have come across a situation similar to the following: A rule and feeder are seemingly working correctly, but upon a data change the expected cells are not returning values, implying they are no longer being fed. Consider the example below showing a simple rule from…
Read MoreHow can you use an alternate hierarchy to manage security in IBM Planning Analytics?
IBM Planning Analytics (PA) allows administrator (admin) users to control users’ read and write access through different levels of object security. The system provides a set of redefined groups for admin purposes but allows custom groups to be created as well that users can belong to. Planning Analytics admins commonly use security controls to limit users’ access to elements within a dimension. This can be done by setting a security group’s access…
Read MoreWhat are the best practices for number-to-string conversions in user-executed file exports in Planning Analytics?
In some cases, it is necessary for a file to be exported by Planning Analytics as needed by the users of the system. In most cases this is done by using the ASCIIOUTPUT command in a TurboIntegrator process. When the export uses a NumberToString() function to convert one of the exported values from a number…
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