Cognos Powerplay Transformer product limitations?

[iamgk]

Hi All,
I found that Cognos transformer will be best fit for our requirement of customer count than IBM DB2 OLAP Server as they have a built in feature to count for no. of customers (Unique and non unique). To acheive the functionality of a unique or distinct customer count, we created a dimension as customer which has unique customer ids and have a measure which will count on that dimension. This exactly solves our problem.
BUT the catch is, it will not allow more than 65536 members or records under a dimension. The no. is derived from 2 power 16 and the field type of cognos dimension I assume to be of short integer. As we have more customers than 65536, it gives the following error,
"[TR1901] the number of children (or parents) of a catgory cannot exceed 65,536 [Drill] in Customer_Age_band_Fact.mdc."
Any idea on how to solve the problem. Or have I reached the limits of the product.? Any comments/Suggestions/input are most welcome.
Thanks and Best Regards
GK

 

[Emili]

No, you haven't reached the product limits.

To solve this you can create an 'artificial' level in the costumenr dimension.
For instance, if costume id is the source value for category generation of costumer dimension, you can create a new field at the datasource, calculated as a substring of costumer id.
This new field must be the source data for the new level in the costumer dimension, this level must be the parent of the costumer level.

The calculation can be done in Transformer as well as in iqd (I suposse you use impromptu).

Note: ensure that there are no more than 65535 children for each parent, you could use the 'right' command, with the las 4 characters.
Beware also that there can't be more the 65535 parents.
Anyway if you know how is costumer id generated you can easy create this substring.

On the other side, I have noticed that category counts measures are rather slow.

So could you tell us how many costumers you have?

Good luck,
Emilio Abella
emilio.abella@moebiusconsulting.com