Category Archives: Ireland

Last week I used PowerPivot for the first time in a classic budgeting scenario. The existing, Excel based, system was straining at the seams due to recent changes in the organisation (merger, followed by lots of changes, resulting in the replacement of long-established reporting and budgeting hierarchies).

The budget process followed the, more or less, classic lines of using adjusted previous years figures to create high-level targets for coming years, agreeing those targets with various interests and then “driving” these high-level targets down various hierarchies to inform front-line staff what would be expected of them in the years to come.

PowerPivot did a marvellous job of providing the necessary figures required to set the initial budgets and to help inform those who must agree them. This involved lots of moving-annual-totals, percentage-increases and so on. A dream compared to the purely excel methods employed in the past.

The “driving down” logic was however kept outside PowerPivot, as the hierarchies involved were unbalanced in the main and the rules were complex but already existed and worked (and probably more importantly were understood and agreed by the various “interested parties”) in Excel. All that was required was the creation of the numerous “flattened cross-join tables” to support the existing logic. The various SQLite “hierarchy helpers” I detailed in my previous Handling Flat, Parent-Child and Nested Set Hierarchies post did most of the heavy lifting. As the process involved the “cross-join” of  hierarchies at various levels I used a great deal of “nested set” SQL to achieve the required result; simple enough, but did become tedious and made the resulting logic somewhat un-approachable for those with limited SQL. What I needed was another “helper function”. The CROSS_JOIN_HIER function was born!

FUNCTION: CROSS_JOIN_HIER

First argument is the hierarchy table name (see previous post for description of this table). The 2nd is the output table name. This table must already exist and have at least the same number of columns as the number of subsequent arguments.

The remaining arguments specify the source of the tables (single column lists) to cross-join in order to populate the output table. The arguments can be of three types.

• The name of an existing table. This table must consist of single column named “Name”. This allows for complex (or perhaps, simple lists in a different sort order) to be generated outside the function call.
• A request for a list of nodes from some level within a hierarchy. Such requests can consist of one of the following:
  • Integer between 0 and 99. If the column name associated with this argument (e.g. arg 1 implies column 1 of output table, arg 2 column 2 etc…) is the same name as a valid hierarchy, fetch all nodes at that level (e.g. if 0, then fetch top level nodes, if 1, 2nd level etc..). Allows for up to 99 levels (i.e max value  98). Level 99 is special, it’ll return all “leaf nodes” i.e. those nodes with no children.
  • aNode,(+ or -)integerValue e.g. “Beer,+2″, in this case fetch all nodes 2 levels below Beer in the hierarchy corresponding with column name. The value before the comma must be a valid node name (assumes names are unique within hierarchies). A value after the comma of “-1″ will fetch parent node, a value of “-2″ will fetch grandparent. In both “+” and “-” if the level to navigate down/up is greater than the levels available, the last available level is returned.
  • In both cases above, the name of the column can be over-ridden by prepending the hierarchy name such that: “Product,Beer,+1″ will drive down 1 level from “Beer” in the Product hierarchy. And, “Product,99″ will return a leaf nodes of the Product hierarchy.
• A comma separated list to create a “manual” level. For example, “Budget,Actual”, “2010,2011,2012″ or “Beer”

The resulting single column tables are then cross-joined with the resulting multi-column table (a column for each “source” argument) which is used to populate the output table.

This is a “stored procedure” like function, so should be called using “Select function(arg1,arg2 …);” syntax.

Example: click for larger version.

Download microETL from http://www.gobansaor.com/microetl and unpack to a folder, locate alberto_hier workbook (2007/2010 format) and go to the makeBudgetTable sheet.

The microETL project  is password protected; if you need access to the code just email me I’ll send you on the password.