Forum Discussion
Question for appending Names
Hi MFelix ,
that is one of the options I thought of, but I was wondering if it would really be needed to create a separate dimensional table to realize this. I feel like if this similar to this are going to happen, my datamodel will grow and grow and it will eventually not be maintainable anymore.
Hi DeBIe ,
Only question I have with this type of data is that you can have more than one rule to acommodate all the roles or small changes in the names, you would need a to have filters or measure or slicers and then it's the same ammount of work if not bigger than to have the relational table.
Just giving options
Hi MFelix I do not understand what you are trying to say?
Problem with creating a dimensional table for the names is a option. But how would I create the dimensional table based on latest usernames?
The way I create dimensional tables now is first to duplicate. Then I remove the columns which I do not need and then I remove the duplicate (names). The original column where I created the duplicate from, has over 500.000 records and it will get more. That means that the dimensional table has to load this amount of data as well because it's a duplicate. Is there a better way to do this?
Hi DeBIe ,
In your example you only present 2 names and 2 variations, however when I look at this type of data usually the variations are more than we can handle.
For example you get all this names:
Peter
(Administrator) Peter
Peter Administrator
Peter Admin
Admin Peter
PeterAdmin
Peter Charles
And so on the only question I have here is that Peter is always present in the names but even that can not be full proof.
I think using the dimension table to maintain the relationship between the various alias and the latest name would be a better approach than to have it reling on make a measure or calculated column that would need changes if for example instead of Peter one of your lines now shows up as P. Administrator.
For getting the names you can reference another query and that will only be uploaded once, don't you have any ID for the users? is only based on names?
Hi MFelix
thank you for your reply.
Indeed I do not have ID's in the datawarehouse. It would be possible to add them I think if really needed. I understand what you are trying to say with a lot of variations of usernames. Can you tell me more about the query reference that you are talking about where it will be updated once?