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Having relocated from the Silicon Valley to Bangalore a year back, I¶m now working in an MIS ±
strategic reporting role. In my role to evangelize the use of BI best practices and tools, one of the
foremost is that of universe design. As a matter of fact, I¶m currently being involved in
formalizing a BI policy around the tools we use most ± Oracle, Informatica and SAP Business
Objects (along with migration from our legacy BO to the XI platform!) ± so a lot of my current
work is related to best practices, design guidelines and preparing unit test checklists for my team
of developers.

So here goes my list of universe design best practices. Being the cornerstone of the Business
Objects semantic layer, the universe design becomes one of the most important (next only to the
data warehouse design if there is one, and foremost if there is none) aspects of getting the right
data out there in time for analysis and decision making.

The best practices are grouped by the reporting area they belong to.

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- Object and class naming should be in business terms ± so that it makes sense to the end-
user. This also reduces development overhead since reports can use descriptions out-of-
the-universe, instead of editing headers or creating report level variables.
- All objects should have help text or usage information ± corollary from above.
- Object formatting should preferably be done at the universe level.
- Pre-build condition objects in the universe rather than forcing users to build conditions for
reports.
- Build logic into objects ± translate code, common calculations etc rather than forcing users
to do it in report variables.
- Avoid using WHERE clauses in the object definitions; use CASE statement instead. In
most cases, using WHERE clause will return inc orrect results when similar objects are
included in the result set, due to combined restrictions imposed by the multiple WHERE
clauses.
- èse aggregation in all measure objects ± to push the aggregation to the database wherever
the performance bottleneck is likely to be BO server and the database performance is
optimal. Generally the database is much more powerful at doing aggregation calculations,
and this also reduces the volume of data to be transported over the network.
- All measure objects should include aggregation functions for projection. When this is not
included, BO will not automatically roll -up the data in the report, which could result in
incorrect data and analysis. Note that in the 3.0 version of Designer, a new feature ±
Database Delegated projection function is available to take care of these anomalies while
doing ³averages´ for instance.
- èse Custom LOVs or cascading prompts to display LOVs where hierarchies and numerous
values are involved.
- èse relative date objects for scheduling e.g. Today, Yesterday, Previous Month etc. Create a
separate class to contain these reporting objects ± this helps in improving maintainability.
- èse dynamic HTML in objects where required to avoid users having to build it in report
variables ± end users wouldn¶t like to code hyperlinks themselves, but would love to have
an object which when clicked can lead them to Google Maps for example.
- èse contexts in universes having multiple fact tables ± this helps in getting your measures
(built from multiple fact tables) right.
- èse derived tables to define measures dependent on multiple fact tables.
 - èse derived tables to reduce complexity of queries to be written by users or in place of
views or procedures. A note of caution here: èse derived tables sparingly. If you have
access to the database or DBA and can get views or tables created for the same purpose, go
with it rather than using derived tables. This is not only to push the logic and work closer
to the database, but also to take care of the performance and maintainability aspects.
Exceptions to this include cases where your derived table may include a prompt which
would restrict the number of rows returned and thus improve performance over a
conventional view.
- Reuse code with @Variable. Reuse interactive objects with @Where (if you use them at
all).
- èse @Prompt syntax for conditions and interactive objects where input values are likely to
change or absence of prompt would lead to inaccurate values or unacceptable query
response times. Also make sure regularly used conditions e.g. current year / latest date
should not have prompts to avoid annoying users.
- ³To limit the number of objects created to avoid user confusion, build interactive objects
with @Prompt syntax followed by additional OR clause to include ³´All´" condition.

E.g. µALL¶ IN @Prompt(µEnter Value or ALL¶,'A¶, µClass \Object¶,multi,)

OR

Table.Column IN @Prompt(µEnter Value or ALL¶,'A¶, µClass \Object¶,multi,)´

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- To resolve a chasm trap, define a context for each table at the ³many´ end of the joins.
- To resolve a fan trap, create an alias table for the table producing the multiplied
aggregation. Create a 1:1 join between the original and the alias tables. Modify the select
statement to use the columns from the alias table instead of the original table.
- èse of contexts should be evaluated w.r.t. use of aliases for resolving join issues, to take
care of maintainability of code.
- Integrity checks on the universe structure, parsing of objects, joins, contexts, detecting
loops etc is mandatory. If you wish to use Business Objects to help you detect fan traps or
chasm traps ± you must set the cardinality on the joins. Do not rely on BO to suggest the
cardinality ± this is often erroneous, based on the records sample that BO fetches for each
table.
- èncheck the ³Multiple sql statements for each measure´ option in universe parameters, if
this is not required for resolving any join problems. This option should be checked if the
measures being retrieved in the same query involve different tables. ³Prevent Cartesian
product´ should be checked, as should there be limits placed on the number of records
returned and the time for the sql connection ± to prevent runaway queries which can bring
the database down to its knees and cause an outage for all users.

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- èse shortcut joins wherever possible to reduce number of tables used in a query
- èse aggregate tables /materialized views with aggregate awareness set up to improve query
performance
- èse keys instead of labels where possible to take care of index awareness benefits of
performance and uniqueness
- èse the JOIN_BY_SQL parameter to shift process from BO server to database wherever
the bottleneck for performance is the BO server and the database performance is optimal.
- èpdate the .prm files to enable access to custom SQL functions and improve help text
- Do not use derived tables instead of aggregate tables.
 - Turn off LOVs for all dimension and detail objects that are redundant or not required. This
prevents performance problems when users inadvertently click on the ³Values´ and the
query sets to return all the IDs or other irrelevant data.
- Consider using linked universes with a master kernel universe to ensure consistent
dimensions across multiple universes

This list is certainly not an exhaustive one ± but a work-in-progress. I¶d update it as and when I
compile more; meanwhile if you feel anything has been left out, drop in a line.