Art of BI: OBI Time Dimension Weeks In a Month – Prototype Hack

By | In Art of BI, Big Data, Business Intelligence, OBIEE | February 05th, 2010

I was looking to create a formula that required averaging based on the number of week in the given month. As an example Monthly Sales Total / # Weeks In Month.  Since this is a fiscal calendar the weeks are usually standardized and shouldn’t change that often.  So, if the fiscal calendar is on a 4-4-5 or 4-5-4 the logic is rather straightfoward.

I couldn’t make changes to the underlying Calendar dimension table and I couldn’t recall how to do this programmatically in OBI so I went with what I will call a quick prototyping hack.  Here it is below.

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CASE  WHEN “Indirect Sales”.DIM_TIME.MONTH_NUMBER IN (3, 6, 9, 12) THEN 5 ELSE 4 END

This worked out perfectly as a place holder as we can see by a quick ad-hoc look at the new calculated measure.

[simage=98,400,y,center]

If anyone has the right or clever way of doing this leave a comment.

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Christian Screen
Christian is an innovator in analytics and data warehousing design, best practices, and delivery. With more than fifteenyears of decision support and data warehousing with key experiences at Office Depot HQ, Sierra-Cedar, and Capgemini, he oversees the Oracle Analytics Practice which includes the technical development and delivery of Oracle BI collaboration software, data warehouse solutions, Oracle BI/EPM projects, and packaged analytics solutions at Datavail.

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2 thoughts on “Art of BI: OBI Time Dimension Weeks In a Month – Prototype Hack”

  2. If your physical database is Oracle you could do something like this:

    Evaluate('to_char(%1,%2)',Evaluate('last_day(%1)' as varchar(10), "Indirect Sales”.DIM_TIME.MONTH), 'W' )

    Reply