Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Loading Data in Essbase: Have Sparse Dimension Members before Dense Dimension Members



Even after working in Essbase for quite some time, I have always learnt something new every time.

I got an extract from SQL to load data in Essbase. As far as I remember this was the first time when the format of the file was not provided by me or by my other team member. So, the columns received were in random order and I wanted to load data in Essbase. As expected there were few columns which were not required which I had to ignore during load.

I created a rule file and validated it successfully. When I tried to load the data, I got the following error in the error file for each record:

\\ Invalid number in data column

There were many account members as part of field and these were not assigned as data field.

I reviewed the data for each column but could not find any fault and then it was observed that one of the dense dimension column was appearing before the sparse dimension member and so the error. I moved that (sparse dimension) field before the dense dimension field and it worked.

Clearly, the error message was misleading as in many other cases.

This shows that when you unknowingly follow some standards we may not know until we experience it :)

1 comment:

  1. It follows looks for the block it seems and keep crying for it if it finds Dense, never thought Essbase to be lazy, I thought it was hard working and keep searching for all the potential blocks the first dense member could be part of :). When I had it this error last year, I was also scratching my head.

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