Comments on: Does anyone actually use DMR?

By: Naresh Jasotani

Naresh Jasotani — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 13:47:19 +0000

I agree that the DMR should be included as a part of you solution, only when its an absoulte necessity. However, I have experienced a wonderful DMR performance on Teradata when the database is tuned wonderfully. It worked for the reporting solution. (Though we were heavily database dependent – in terms of aggregated table/indexes and caching.)

As someone already commented, DMR provide a solution to display multiple attributes at a level, I feel if the database is corretly tuned and the data is fetched from an aggregated table like MQT in DB2 and MVs in Oracle then it makes sense to use DMR.

- Thanks
Naresh Jasotani

By: Paul Mendelson

Paul Mendelson — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 13:40:24 +0000

The real was supposed to be in [s]strikeout[/s]…

By: Paul Mendelson

Paul Mendelson — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 13:39:29 +0000

That argument works just as well for adopting a real more mature OLAP source, like SSAS or Essbase.

By: Scott Andrews

Scott Andrews — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 20:55:27 +0000

Usually city/state/region info offer a convenient way to group customers in Transformer, but I can certainly see your point about full address info or contact info. That can gum up a Transformer cube very quickly. Thanks for your comments.

By: CognosBI

CognosBI — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 19:42:26 +0000

Another reason to use DMR is to be able to report on attributes of a dimension level. For example, the level could be Customer, but in Transformer it’s very cumbersome (if not downright impractical) to also report on Customer attributes such as address, city, state, contact, phone, etc. Yes, you can drill-to-detail, but most users want the data in the main report.

By: Scott Andrews

Scott Andrews — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 20:13:52 +0000

Thanks for your comments, Paul.

By: Paul Mendelson

Paul Mendelson — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 19:57:36 +0000

There have been a few times where I’ve had to use DMR. A reporting platform for a website, they needed to show up to the minute information while comparing against another time period. Modeling the non-additive measures would have been an absolute nightmare. As long as the queries are built correctly, with plenty of testing to ensure no local processing, DMR doesn’t cause that much of a performance hit.

For the most part I urge my clients towards SSAS (or even Essbase on occasion), with PowerCubes as a last resort. Debugging DMR queries can be difficult, especially if DQM is enabled. I’ve had problems with DMR and indexes in the past.