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June 23, 2008
Using Cube Perspectives to power your PerformancePoint Analytic Charts
Analytic Charts and grids are some of the most powerful features of PerformancePoint Monitoring and Analytics. They can only be used with Cubes, and provide a powerful interface for drilling up, down, and sideways through the cube.Unofortunately, cubes can be very complex objects for users to explore. A single cube can represent the contents of a complete data warehouse, with multiple measure groups in a cube representing multiple fact tables, and multiple dimensions based on multiple dimension tables. It may not be appropriate to expose the entire cube to a a specific Analytic Chart, but only specific parts of the cube.
Consider using Perspectives in your Analytic Views and Charts. You can use a perspective to reduce the perceived complexity of a cube in Analysis Services.
A perspective defines a viewable subset of a cube that provides focused, business-specific or application-specific viewpoints on the cube. The perspective controls the visibility of objects that are contained by a cube.
Perspectives are created and maintained in Analysis Services 2005.
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Posted by Steve Mann at 2:40 PM | Comments (0)
June 10, 2008
Adding a Proclarity Analytic Report to your PerformancePoint Dashboard
OverviewAdding a Proclarity Analytic Server Report to your PerformancePoint Dashboard is a rather simple process.
To add a PAS Report, simply open a dashboard in Dashboard Designer. Right Click on Reports, Select New Report.
PerformancePoint will present a list of the various types of reports that you can create. Only some reports will be available, depending on your PerformancePoint Site. For example, if you do not use OLAP cubes, then you may not create an Analytic Chart or Grid using the Analytic View Designer.To create a report based on a Proclarity Analytic Report, select "Proclarity Analytics Server Page Report"
At this point, you've simply created a placeholder for a proclarity Report. It does not point to anything yet, and no Dashboards pont to it.
In order for users to see your new report, we have to 1) Specify a Proclarity Analytics Server and Report, then 2) Use the report in a dashboard.
To specify a Proclarity Analytics Server and Report, select the report in Dashboard Designer, then select the Editor Tab.
Set the URL of the desired Proclarity Analytics server. In this case, the URL is the local machine:
http://bi-vpc:81/PAS/
Note that on this server, the Proclarity Analytics web service operates from Port 81. Once the Server is set, click the "Browse" Button to browse the list of reports that reside on the targeted Proclarity Server. Leave the "Conigruation Options" field blank.
Publish your report to the Monitoring Server.
To add the Proclarity Analytic Server Report to your Dashboard, open up the Dashboard that will use the Proclarity Report. On the right hand side Details pane, there should be a tree of the workspace elements, one of which is "reports".
Select the report to be added, then drag and drop its icon on to the scorecard. Please refer BOL for further guidance on scorecard elements.
Publish your Dashboard ot the Monitoring Server, then Preview your Dashboard.
Note you can navigate to show different aspects of the data by using the drilldown options.
Drill to Details will open a window to display detail data.
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Posted by Steve Mann at 1:33 PM | Comments (0)
PerformancePoint Server 2007 Planning Data Migration Tool
Microsoft has a new tool out to assist you in migrating a Planning Server application from one server to another.
There appears to be two steps involved in moving a PerformancePoint Planning Server Application from one server to another. In the first step, the tool migrates the following objects:
- Security roles
- Structural metadata: all model site, model, dimension, and member set definitions
- Data Sources and Data Destinations
- Calculation rules and any associated job templates
- Form templates
- Calendar
In the second step, we migrate the following:
- Dimension and hierarchy data
- Fact data and annotations
- Associations
There are numerous steps in each of the above two sections which need to be followed extremely carefully in order for the Data to be properly migrated into the Target Application.
You can find the tool here: Planning Data Migration Tool
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Posted by Steve Mann at 12:17 PM | Comments (0)
PerformancePoint Monitoring and Analytics Database Datamodel
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Posted by Steve Mann at 10:32 AM | Comments (0)
PerformancePoint 2007 Analytic Charts and Grids
Overview
Analytic Charts and Grids are powerful tools for analyzing performance data inside PerformancePoint. Analytic Charts and Grids can be created using the PerformancePoint Dashboard designer. They support drilldown, drill up, and drill anywhere capability, and allow users a high degree of freedom to slice and dice their data in a variety of ways.
The primary difference between an analytic chart and grid is the resulting viewer used to display the data. An analytic grid displays tabular data in columns and rows. An Analytic Chart displays line charts, bar charts, and other more graphical types of controls.
Analytic Charts and grids require a SQL Server 2005 cube.
Two Modes for creating Analytic charts and grids
Analytic charts and grids can be created in two ways. The method used to create the Analytic view has repercussions that should be considered. With Analytic views, there can sometimes be a trade-off between the sophistication of the view versus the navigation options available to the user.
MDX Mode
Custom MDX Mode requires that the developer use textual queries to define the content of the Analytic Chart and Grid. When using Custom MDX mode, you lose almost all of your navigation options for drilling up, down, and across the hierarchies. This is a fairly significant effect.
The benefit of using custom MDX is that the developer has more control over the output of the data. For example, it is not possible to do a TOP 5 MDX query or some types of MDX sorts using the designer. Top 5 and some Sorting MDX queries require Custom MDX mode.
Analytic View Designer Mode
The analytic view designer gives you a nice drag and drop interface for design your views. With the view designer, you are more limited in the types of views that you can create, however you have easy access to the measures and dimensions in your cube. In addition, filtering is a little easier when using the designer.
PerformancePoint Best Practice
For simpler Grids and Charts, use the Analytic View Designer rather than MDX Mode for your Analytic Views. This mode offers a drag and drop interface whereby cube elements can be added and removed. The benefit of using this mode is that you have all the navigation actions available in the view.
One best practice that experienced PerformancePoint consultants at RDA use is to create the base chart or view using the Analytic View Designer, then switch over to MDX Mode to add more sophisticated MDX query options, such as MDX Crossjoin, Intersect, and MTD.
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Posted by Steve Mann at 8:16 AM | Comments (0)
June 4, 2008
Using the PPS Add-In for Excel Spreading Features and Setting a Leaf Level Cell Lock
Issue:A client requires using the spreading feature of the PPS Add-In for Excel but they want to be able to “lock-in” a value for a specific level so that the spreading does not change that value.
Solution:
The use of Spreading and Cell Locking is very easy to attain in the PPS Add-In for Excel and the following example displays how to perform such a task.
Example:
I have a Budget I wish to Submit for Travel Expenses for January of 2009. The Accounts are broken up over three categories, Airfare, Meals amp; Entertainment and Hotel. For our Budget Scenario, the user is going to be able change the Total Expenses and initially the values across all of the subcategories will be evenly dispersed. The following screen print illustrates the user Entry into the Total Expenses Category and the values being distributed across the subcategories:
The first step to make the above process work was to introduce Spreading into the Form, and in this example, Ratio Spreading was selected.
Spreading can be applied by going to the PerformancePoint Menu and selecting Options:
After selecting the Options button, the Options Dialog will appear. Under the Data Entry section, there is a Spreading Type drop down where you can pick Ratio as the Spreading Type.
Once the Spreading Type of Ratio is applied, the user can now Lock a subcategory value and apply different scenarios of Total Expenses to have the calculation auto compute against the non-locked subcategories. For our example, we are going to state that the Meals amp; Entertainment subcategory shall remain at 40 even when Total Expense changes.
To perform the Lock of the subcategory, highlight the cell to be locked and then click the padlock icon, which is available in the Action Pane:
After the lock is performed, changing the Total Expenses from 120 to 150 will present the following results:
Summary:
The above example provides a simple step by step on how the Assignment user has full control of their budget numbers while also leveraging the rules built into the application to have Excel compute subcategory amounts.
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Posted by Steve Mann at 3:46 PM | Comments (0)
