I am putting together a sort of best-practice document for the junior consultants of my team about how to effectlively work with TM1 (for example: why are comments important, how to write them, why is it good to use spaces in code, etc). I am mostly using Cubewise's Bedrock White Papers, and presenting most of the advice there.
(Side question: for programmers familiar with these documents, are there any points in there that have not held up as time passed over the years since they were published? What parts do you think should be revised?)
Most points in the papers I can argue for easily, but I am stuck with one point, and it's a major one, and one that has never been used by my team. This is using separate measure dimensions for each cube. What is standard in my current team is to create one measure dimension, and put any measures that are used in any of the cubes in this one measure dimension.
The white paper only says this:
The pro of using one measure dimension is that you only have to define (and format) often-used measures (like Revenue) once, and you don't have to define it every time a new cube uses it. The drawback is that this dimension now has 100+ elements, for all kinds of special exceptions etc. Cleanup is especially hard (how do you figure out if one element is used in a cube somewhere in a big model?), maintenance is hard, visually it is not appealing at all.While many of the dimensions within a cube may be shared with other cubes, there should always be a separate measures dimension that is unique to each cube.
However, I find myself in a spot where I am having a hard time coming up with more arguments for the separate dimensions best practice. I would like more talking points, to demonstrate once and for all that separate measures dimensions are superior. What are your thoughts, what other advantages would you highlight for using separate measure dimensions, and what other disadvantages to you see with using just one big measure dimension?
Thank you kindly for any insight.
