Measuring impact of adding a new dimension to an existing BPC application

[former_member219713]

Hello experts,

We have been approached by one of our divisions to add a new dimension to an existing company-wide application. We have never had the need to add dimensions previously but are now looking for any information or documentation that can help in measuring the would-be impact of this change? What statistics are the most relevant? Impact on cube size, database size, report refresh times, etc? How do we measure these stats?

Multi-server environment with app/web server, sql server and olap server...approximately 1500 users.

[Former Member]

Hi Hitesh,

As the experts have already indicated, you just need to keep few things in mind.

1. Take a backup of the existing data in a flat file.

2. Make the necessary changes in the flat file, by adding another row for the new dimension and mention some members in each of the rows.

3. Take a backup of journal data, if any.

4. In BPC Admin, add the new dimension to the application.

5. Upload the edited flat file through SQL import directly into the fact table.

6. Review your script logic, SSIS, DM packages, work status and all the templates.

Hope this helps.

[Former Member]

Adding a dimension could have an impact on performance also.

Test and compare Excel refresh on a staging environment.

[Former Member]

Your cubes and fact tables for that particular application will be dropped and recreated in the backend, since you are adding a new dimension. So take a backup of the data before doing anything.

You may add the dimension and process the application.

After this you must do changes in the Excel reports and Input schedules using that particular application, to include that dimension. As said in the previous post, you may need to do changes in the Script Logic too.

You must add a dimension column and a dimension member to the data exported from earlier production system, and then load the data into the fact tables.

The application needs to be processed, after this with optimization.

[radharamansingh_rajkumar]

Hi,

After changing you need re configure all your scripts and reports, Input Schedules.

But for data you can export all the data and make the necessary changes and import it once again.

Donot forget to Reassign and Process the dimension.

Regards

Raman