Supressing small results

[Yunus]

Hi everyone,

I have a transformer cube that contains personnel data for a company and while reporting on aggregates is acceptable I need to be able to prevent Personally Identifiable Information(PII) from being released.  Some people use the "rule of 4" or other similar sized sets to determine if something is PII.

Is it possible to have Transformer make any intersections that result in less than 4 (or X number) to be masked so that it is not visible to the user?  I'm hoping to do this at the transformer or Analysis studio level so that the raw data is not impacted and that aggregates are not impacted.

[bdbits]

Do your cubes have a dimension with data down to the person level, or more that you are concerned someone could choose a set of criteria that would show that obviously only one or a few people are in the statistics? Who is using the data - management or everybody or something between?

I guess my thought is that perhaps you can permit aggregate reporting by restricting access to the lower levels with custom views (using an apex, for example). You can assign security to custom views, so you could have some views that are filtered for more general use, with lower levels only available to a restricted set of users. I have some cubes with multiple departments, and a dimension with the organizational structure. I use custom views so each department can only see their own data, but high-level aggregates are available to all. It works well enough for my purposes and you might be able to make this work to hide PII.

I think it might be easier to use a DMR FM model instead of a cube, and be able to structure query subjects to return a minimal number of rows. Or, build those queries in FM and pull those query subjects into Transformer. Not sure, I'd have to give that some thought as to whether it could do the trick.

[Yunus]

The name of the person being derived from a chosen set of fields is the concern.

I didn't think that there was an easy solution but I've been surprised in the past and realized that a simple setting could do some task that I thought was very complex, I was just checking to make sure I wasn't missing something obvious.