Metric Aliases
This is a little “don’t” that I stumbled upon recently.
Don’t create metric aliases that contain operators such as “-“, “+”, and so long. Although MicroStrategy allows you to do so, the database application (Oracle, Teradata,…) will nag you about expecting “something between – and ,” and of course, the report will stop executing.
Categories: Basic Series, Data Warehouse, Reports, Theory, Tips and Tricks don't, metric aliases, ODBC error
Weird…odd that that pushes through to Oracle…do the metrics themselves have column names as well?
I guess I’m lucky that everything that I work in is SQL.
By default the SQL Engine generates metric column names with names like WJXBFS1, WJXBFS2,…
Rumor has it that those are the initials of early MicroStrategy developers, but it could be just a myth.
However, we can define custom alias names in the metric editor (Tools -> Advanced Settings -> Metric Column Options), mainly for debugging purposes. When skimming a multiple step SQL is easier to search for the alias than for WJXBFS28