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BIAnalytix Tip Summary: Analysis of Historical Attributes

Many attributes of analysis dimensions can change over time and the analysis options need to be carefully understood in a powerful Media Business Intelligence environment. A data warehouse is designed to keep all values of past history so that past reporting can be exactly reproduced. However there are situations where past history may need to be viewed from a different perspective from this strict historical record keeping. As one example, stations can change network affiliation year to year, and comparison analysis of the stations under the network affiliation hierarchy will show this year’s revenue under the current network and last year’s revenue under the old network. In order to keep the station’s history aligned for certain reporting an additional attribute is often required with looks up the current value of the attribute (that is the current network affiliation) for all historical information. Analysis under this new “current” attribute (which ignores the network changes) will enable current facts to be compared to historical facts within the “new” attribute hierarchy. For example, the new “Current Network Affiliation” hierarchy analysis would show the current revenue for the station on the same report line as the historical revenue and thus support direct comparisons even though the affiliation changed over the last year.

In addition to identifying the dimension attributes that need an additional “current attribute” to support this type of flexible analysis, there are also some attributes that should never have different historical values. Any changes made to these attributes should be applied to all history to update the analysis directly. Another situation that requires some careful thought is where the change of an attribute is because the previous value was incorrect. In this case care needs to be taken by IT to ensure that the update for the change to the data warehouse is implemented in a special way that corrects all historical values.

BIAnalytix is a media data warehouse and business intelligence system from Decentrix that fully supports the capture and analysis of all past business values. It also supports the additional current attribute to allow comparative analysis even when the attribute has changed. Further, attributes can be specified to be globally applicable to support updates to all history analysis.

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