Date basis for streams

Struggling to think of a way to describe it without calling it a Dimension but essentially we have some streams that end up duplicated as we want to look at the same data but with a different Date dimension.

For example, an Aged Debt report can be looked at by Posting Date or Due Date. A Customer Query log could be by Date Raised, or Decision Date. Purchase Orders could be by Date Placed or Delivery Date.

Not sure on how much time adding multiple duplicate streams add to the build, but would it not be simpler to have an option for a drop down to select the date that you want to use from the stream, where multiple date columns exist.

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I may be speaking out of turn here, not having any inside knowledge of how Phocas works in the background, but what your suggesting wouldn’t save any time on builds. When the database is built, the measure are basically rolled up by the dimensions for each of the time periods you’ve specified for the database. (i.e. Year, Month, Day, etc.) So, in your example, it takes X amount of time to roll up the measure by Posting Date. And X amount of time to roll it up by Due Date. So having 2 streams, based on the 2 different dates is going to take 2X time to build. Even if you only had 1 stream, but had the ability to selected between the 2 dates, you would still have to have the measures rolled up for each date, so you’re still looking at 2X time to build.

You are correct @aaron.roma, the database build would still require time to process each of the different dates.

@StuartH are you having difficulty using different streams in this manner?

Thanks, that makes sense.

No issues just concious of adding more and more streams and the list getting long and complex.

Oh I understand. We’ve had a bit of bloat too, and I’ve been working lately on trying to trim some of that back, and shorted our build times a bit.

We have the same request. We want to look at promise dates, order dates and ship dates all for our customer orders. We have to create different streams to do this as well. It just gets messy. I would love to just drag another date column up in the design and then have an option to look at the data based on any of those dates.

We have this requirement for several other processes as well (pricing exceptions, dates created, dates expired).

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