Having trouble importing parent-child dimensions

[chris.wolf]

Hello, this is my first post here. I am running Cognos TM1 10.2 and Insight 10.2, currently on Windows7 for prototyping. I am using Insight to create a cube before publishing to TM1. I am trying to import multi-level data from a CSV file. I read the appropriate doc for how to do this: http://pic.dhe.ibm.com/infocenter/ctm1/ ... _cube.html

Unfortunately in their example, they have discretely named levels "years, quarters, months, days" - but in my case, each row in the CSV has an integer "id" and "parent-id" field to establish the hierarchy via relative positioning. I tried making the "parent-id" the "Owner Dimension" of "id", but the imported data is still "flat". I know that there are only three levels so maybe I need to do some preprocessing to map the relative id/parentid relationship to surrogate named levels, i.e. "one, two, three" as the hierarchical dimension?

[jim wood]

One of the things you're going to run into with this is that I don't think most of the people on here use Insight to do this on a regular basis. Normally the dvelopment tools of choice are either Performance modeler or Perspectives, especially when creating cubes and dimensions. If you're very new to TM1 I would recommend using Performance modeler as it has something called guided import which helps you create dimensions from what sounds like a parent / child flat file. If you've installed it I would recommend having a look. Otherwise hopefully somebody has done this in insight and will be able to help you,

Jim.

[chris.wolf]

Jim,

Thanks for the reply. I launched "Performance Modeler", then right-clicked on the "Cubes" folder icon, then selected "Guided Import" from the context menu and was presented with an import wizard that appears to be identical to the Insight import wizard. I performed the same import and the results were the same except after the import, I got a warning dialog with the following message:

Error: Epilog procedure line (52): The resulting hierarchy for the dimension "parentid" does not align with the level structure defined in the mapping. When parent-child dimensions are being treated as level based or when level based dimensions are being constructed using source data containing non-unique member identifiers, unexpected hierarchy structures may result. For the case when non-unique member identifiers exist in the source data, turn on the "Qualify member names" dimension property in the mapping page.

I believe this is because there is a many-to-one relationship of child-to-parent. If I turn on "Qualify member names", I'm afraid the original many-to-one relationship will degenerate to one-to-one. And, yes I am very new to TM1. The last time I did any heavy OLAP development was in the mid 90's using Oracle Express. (IRI Express)

[declanr]

Can you post your data source (or a section of it - numbers etc can be randomised)?

[chris.wolf]

Wow, thanks for offering to look, Declan. I uploaded an anonymized, sample dataset. It's an extraction from the logs of a multi-task process. The units of execution are "run", "process" and "task", where a "run" can kick off one or more processes and a "process" can kick off one or more "tasks". The field "duration_ms" indicates the number of milliseconds the particular execution unit took to run. The "task" durations should roll up to the duration value of their parent "process" - likewise, the "process" durations should roll up to their parent "run" (there's only one "run" in the sample). These relationships are indicated via the "opId" and "parentId" fields.

[chris.wolf]

Meanwhile, I found this tutorial on building cubes via "Turbointegrator". There is a section about creating dimensions with hierarchies.

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocente ... ogPro.html

So I'll see if I can adapt this process to my use-case.