Duplicate categories in Transformer

[Dev1975]

Hi, I posted this question in another topic but thought I'd start a new one in case it wasn't seen. Apologies for the spam but this is getting a bit urgent and the Customer is looking for a resolution to this so he can get users to carry out testing.

Cheers,
Dev

===

Hi, I'm having a similar problem with a Customer cube at the moment. I've deleted the categories under "Customer" from the Categories window and then create the powercube, however the values are shown as duplicate. So, instead of one entry I am seeing two for each Customer.

Is there a way of enabling some tracing during the build process to see what is actually happening? Also, is there any other way of ensuring that duplicates are not generated during the cube build?

Many thanks,
Dev

[Dev1975]

Just a quick update...all the Customer values (the source value) are different. So, the same Customer showing twice has two different source values, which would explain why it is duplicated as it sees each one as being different.

Question is, is there a way of stopping this from happening? Can I set it so that whenever the cube builds, it only brings in one version of the Customer and not both? Or is there a way of stopping it at the source?

[Michael75]

How is your Customer dimension being populated? Does your cube have multiple data sources? The way I would do this would be to have:

#1. 1 Customer data source which has as columns CUST_ID (Source) and CUST_NAME (Label)
#2. n fact data sources, some/all of which contain CUST_ID

If you are doing something like this, check the range of values of CUST_ID coming from #2. (NB Data Source Viewer, and the generated SQL, is your friend here). The CUST_ID values should all match values that are present in #1. If you are getting non-matching values in #2, you need to check your data. One technique I use here is:

- Open the Category Diagram, and delete all Customer Categories
- Right click on the Customer data source, and choose Generate Categories From Selected Data Source. At this point, you should have one occurrence of each customer
- Leave the Category Diagram open on the Customer Categories, and successively run Generate Categories From Selected Data Source on each fact data source which contains CUST_ID. If one of them causes new Customer Categories to appear in the Category Diagram, that's where you need to start investigating.

HTH
Michael

[Dev1975]

Thanks for the tip Michael, much appreciated. Will bear that in mind if issues spring up again but so far, all is well. *crosses fingers*

:)