TM1 Forum

garry cook wrote:2 Dimensions walk into a bar, one starts chatting up a woman and all seems to be going well until she stands up, slaps the dimension and storms off. "What happened there then?" asks the first dimension. "Don't know - was going fine until I told her I had 6,000 children" said the second dim.

Any better jokes from anyone please?

garry cook wrote:Not to be pedantic either but technically they can still be children as well as elements assuming it's built that way but yeah, prob works better as a "Single parent with 6,000 children" if I use consolidations instead

And I'm glad to hear confirmation you've never heard of any TM1 jokes Alan - this is surely conclusive proof that they truly have never existed as if they had, I'm sure you'd have been the custodian.

I feel I can go and claim my money from the "Nobody's ever invented a TM1 joke before" bet I've got going.

Cheers matey

Alan Kirk wrote:

Alan Kirk wrote:I was kinda hoping that Mike L might have been drifting around the Interwebs since this is the sort of question that he relishes.

Hmm... it seems that Mike L's not going to come to the rescue. Allow me to try, with a little help from a recent trip in the De Lorean. (Which I figured was a lot easier than having to dig the old OLAP theory texts out of the library.)

{Cracks knuckles, settles back in chair and wiggles fingers over the keyboard to loosen them up... OK, here we go.}

The etymology of the word "slice" traces back to the Sumerian civilisation, circa 4600 BCE. (Though given the intricacies of Sumerian morphology, it's important to note that the common pronunciation at the time was "schliche" with a guttural accent on the "ch". The first one of course, not the second one, except in some of the eastern provinces.)

OLAP theory is widely believed to have begun with Bogdatch of Bodyodur, who first found a way to implement linear regression analysis of the size of his goat herd in relation to the number of wolves in the area, the average precipitation for that month, and the seasonal demand for McGoatBurgers at the local fast (for the era) food franchise.

Bogdatch carved data relating to those variables deeply into a moist clay tablet. He found that by peeling narrow strips from the top of the clay tablet, dividing them up and arranging them in different locations in a grid that he had laid out on the ground of his farm (which he had named "Exchel", again with a guttural accent on the "ch"), he could correctly anticipate fluctuations in the number of his ruminant underlings. These thin strips of clay became the first "slice". (Or, as Bogdatch would insist, "schliche")

Bogdatch taught this skill to other goatherds. They formed a collective called Goatlap Forums, and occasionally got together to swap stories of how best to implement the new TurboTablet tool that had been introduced to make the creation of clay tablets easier. One morning after a hard night of drinking fermented barley with his Goatlap Forums colleagues at the Eridu Arms, Bogdatch found that his hand was rather less steady than it should have been. This resulted in the schliches being carved more thickly than he intended. When he divided the schliches so that they could be placed within his Exchel analysis grid, he couldn't help but notice the similarity between his individual data points, and the objects that he had been using to play a game of chance at the Eridu Arms the previous night.

And thus, Bogdatch had discovered the method of performing an OLAP "Dice".

Later that afternoon, Bogdatch's head was still pounding. He made two decisions:
(a) To never again drink room temperature fermented barley which had been imported from places with strange-sounding names like "Lytham" and "Liverpool"; and
(b) He was far too hung over to do any real goat herding that day.

He therefore began to play with his new OLAP "Dice" as if they were building blocks. He laid them out on the ground in a square pattern, then placed another layer on top of that, then another layer, then another. When the layers were as high as they were deep and wide, Bogdatch realised that he had made a remarkable discovery...

The first OLAP cube had been created.

So next time you're having a room temperature pot of fermented barley in your local tavern, remember to raise one to the memory of Bogdatch of Bodyodur, without whom none of us would have jobs.