Impact Analysis and Data Lineage in DMExpress 4
Posted by:Steve | Fri 07 December 2007
New to
DMExpress 4.x is the very useful Impact Analysis feature.
Here’s an example multi-level aggregation job where I want to take some raw sales data and aggregate it to total sales per sales person, sales manager, and sales division.
Let’s say I want to change how the intermediate total field is calculated in one of the tasks comprising the job, and want to see what impact this change will have on the rest of the job:
If you’d like to try this out for yourself:
- Open an existing job in the DMExpress Job Editor.
- Go to the “View” menu and click on “Metadata Panel” (Note: this is a required step since you can’t do any analysis until the Metadata Panel is open).
- Select the object that you’re interested in from the graphical job view – in this case it’s the “InputToSalesDivision.txt” file.
- Select the specific object field that you’re interested in from the Metadata Panel on the right hand side of the window.
- Click on the “Descendant” button in the toolbar.
A few points to note about the resulting display:
- The specific metadata object being analyzed is circled in blue.
- Any data flowing from the selected object is highlighted by blue arrows.
- Other tasks within the job that reference the selected metadata are highlighted by a blue border around the whole task.
You can also check where the input data that was used to calculate the intermediate total field came from by clicking on the “Precedent” button – this is also often known as the “Data Lineage” of a field.
This was a fairly simple example, but I think you can see that Impact Analysis would definately come in handy as your jobs increase in complexity.
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