Key Id's and Transformer 1

[datawrangler]

Creating a new model from our 'new' data warehouse. Here's the issue. In order to build the dimensions, I've been told that I have to add the key id of each table in the data souce as the last level and mark that key id unique. ok, fair enough, although a pain in the neck. the invoice date information is all in one table, with a key id "s_calendar". this key id is not a date, just a key. when i create my main time dimension, the transformer date wizard is not kicking in, therefore i'm getting the years/qtrs/wks/days... but none of the YTD/QTD/WTD grouped info. I do not want to have to do this manually as I have a whole truckload of manual date ranges i am already going to have to design as well. any tricks out there to help with using key id's for dates? fyi.. i'm using Transformer 7.2. the data is on our sql server, so the iqds are being fed to transformer with sql statements (the developer did all of this). the whole thing seems really testy and very error-prone. any advice for building models the unique keys would be greatly appreciated.

 

[GJParker]

If you want transformer to create the special categories for your date groupings you need to create the Time dimension using the Date wizard and make the dimesnion type Time.

HTH

Gary Parker
MIS Data Analyst
Manchester, England

 

[datawrangler]

Yep, I already did that. I rebuilt that dimension and it seems to work now. The issue has now moved to my second time dimension "First Sale Date". When I bring our First Sale date dimension which (by the way) lives in our products table, everything goes heywire. The unique surrogate key is the Products key ID, the dimension itself is defined as time. If I do not use the surrogate key, the date wizard kicks in, but the dates are not tied to anything and all of the sales flow as equal amounts through each level after the model builds. If I add the key in order to tie the information to the products and mark it as unique, build, save, and close, the model refuses to open and gives me an error saying that I have deleted a category source... arrggh. Anyway, thanks for the response.

 

[GJParker]

What are you trying to show bu using this dimension ?

If each product has 1 unique 'first sale date' then I would expect you to see the same sales values as you are experiencing.



Gary Parker
MIS Data Analyst
Manchester, England