Staging Cube

Owned by Petr Buncik
Oct 12, 2023
2 min read

The staging cube serves as a repository for the reusable rollups of the Chart of Accounts (CoA) structure. Data is imported in text format, and both the structure of the rollup and the associated attribute definitions and values are stored within this cube.

The rollup structure can be stored in two formats: short and long. The short format captures parent-child relationships on a single line, with each line representing a direct relationship between two elements.

On the other hand, the long format decomposes parent-child relationships by element levels. In this format, an element’s position at a higher level determines its relationship with elements positioned above it at lower levels.

First line (Total Rows level) is reserved for attribute definitions. Each attribute is defined by its type, name and language variant. Type of attribute can be S for string, N for numeric and A for alias type. The type must precede attribute name and must be enclosed in block brackets. Language variant of an attribute follows its name and it must be enclosed in block brackets. The language variant must conform to language (ISO) codes as defined in }Cultures dimension. This also means you may define the same attribute multiple times in many different language variants, because on subsequent lines the actual attribute values are defined for each element (the attribute values always relate to the child element in case of short format).

Following lines contain element names and structure definition. It is necessary to follow logic of either short or long format to import the structure properly. For short format, parent elements are stored in vLevel1 and child elements in vLevel2. For long format, a root element is always in vLevel1, while its descendants are on below lines stored in vLevel2 - vLevel30, which is maximum depth allowed, capping relations at 30 distinct levels.

Following are definitions of element type in vType column and element weight inside its relation to parent element in vWeight column -- for short format the parent is defined in vLevel1, in long format the parent is immediate ancestor one level above.

Definition of attribute values follows as described above, values can contain special characters (UTF-8) according to ISO language variant of the attribute.

Example of how CoA sample structure looks like in a long format:

Example of how CoA structure looks like in a short format:

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