Focal Point
OLAP and large record sets

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October 04, 2005, 05:34 AM
JPierce
OLAP and large record sets
I am trying to use the OLAP functionality with a record set of about 30k rows and 30 columns. When the OLAP browser window and pane open, it takes almost 5 minutes to load (if it does load, half of the time the window crashes).

The issue seems to be that it tries to load all 30k rows into the window.

I am trying to find a solution that will allow the OLAP browser window to start but not query any data until the user picks columns and conditions in the OLAP pane.

Any ideas or suggestions would be very appreciative.

Thanks, Jason
October 06, 2005, 06:46 PM
Tim J
Jason:

I feel your pain. We have the same issue with a report we are working on. Our network, along with the daily traffic has made the OLAP report useless for some of our larger divisions.

Using some tips from this bulletin board, I created a Hold File with the data I needed and then processed this Hold File. This still didn't help us.

I have eliminated the OLAP functionality and I'm now using On Demand Paging with the WebViewer. This helped a lot and our report comes to the screen in a respectable time frame, even for the largest reports. This displays the data on the screen as each page is generated and comes with a tool bar to skip from page to page, a search bar, and a few other options.

Since our users wanted some of the OLAP capabilities, like column sorting and the option to save to Excel, I am adding that functionality to the report manually using some more tips I found on this board.

I am having some trouble getting those two features to work, but I am close.

In summary, I can recommend:
1. Use a Hold File for processing
2. Use On Demand Paging
3. Add some of the OLAP features manually if you can.

Until there is some other solution to help with our network speed at my work, this is what I have to work with.

Thanks,
Tim
October 06, 2005, 07:22 PM
Tom Walker
I trick OLAP by making it return only one row with one column. For Example:

TABLE FILE MYTABLE
SUM CNT.STU_ID AS 'Head,Count'
WHERE ...
ON TABLE SET OLAPPANE TOP
...

This will be enough to kick off the OLAP process. The user will see a single count on the screen. The user can then get the desired fields by selecting them as dimensions. Likewise, filters can be applied.
October 14, 2005, 03:21 AM
JPierce
I tried Tim's solution but I have too many potential conditions to effectively recreate the OLAP funcationality manually.

For Tom's solution, I was able to get the OLAP screen created and bring in the additional dimensions. However, I could not bring in more data than the SUM CNT.STU_ID.

When I run it with all the data, I have:

TALBE FILE MYTABLE
PRINT
FIELD1
FIELD2
FIELD3 (on to FIELD30)
FIELD30

And I need the OLAP panel to start up so that the user can still retrieve data from all these fields. With Tom's solution, I can start the pane quickly but not get back to my complete dataset.

Is there any way to do this? Thanks for all your help.
November 21, 2006, 08:38 PM
Joao
You probably have an answer to this question by now.
My report used three dimensions which included 10 fields that were displayed on appeared on top with ON TABLE SET OLAPPANE TOP command.
However, in my report request I used SUM for the measures insteasd of PRINT and sorted the Report by only 2 of the dimensional fields.
This may limit your browser having to pull back so many records, until you use a filter/and or add columns until after you are in OLAP\HTML output.