OBIEE - Densification / Dimensions Preservation Possibilities

You may want to view the data in dense form, with rows for all combination of dimension values displayed even when no fact data exist for them.

A MOLAP environment give you automatically this feature but in a ROLAP system, you have to perform a SQL densification.

The densification process also known as the preservation of the dimensions.

For example, if a product did not sell during a particular time period, you may still want to see the product for that time period with zero sales value next to it.

Data densification is the process of converting sparse data into dense form.

An article was written especially and give the various methods to densify the data : Analytic - Data Densification (sparse to dense data)

The most important method is to create a cross join between the dimension to have all possible combination and to outer join them with the fact data.

You have two possibilities in OBIEE to densify the data :

• by designing the repository : OBIEE - Densification with the fact-based fragmentation capabilities
• or with the OBIEE logical Sql : OBIEE - Densification with the logical Sql