Features of Allocation in Oracle OLAP

The Oracle OLAP allocation system is very flexible and has many features, including the following:

• The source, basis, and target objects can be the same variable or they can be different objects.

• The source and basis objects can be formulas, so you can perform computations on existing data and use the result as the source or basis of the allocation.

• You can specify the method of operation of the allocation for a dimension. The operations range from simple to very complex.

• You can specify whether the allocated value is added to or replaces the existing value of the target cell.

• You can specify an amount to add to or multiply by the allocated value before the result is assigned to the target cell.

• You can lock individual values in a dimension hierarchy so that the data of the target cells for those dimension values is not changed by the allocation. When you lock a dimension value, then the allocation system normalizes the source data, which subtracts the locked data from the source before the allocation. You can choose to not normalize the source data.

• You can specify minimum, maximum, floor, or ceiling values for certain operations.

• You can copy the allocated data to a second variable so that you can have a record of individual allocations to a cell that is the target of multiple allocations.

• You can specify ways of handling allocations when the basis has a null value.

• You can use the same aggmap in different ALLOCATE commands to use the same set of dimension hierarchy values, operations, and arguments with different source, basis, or target objects.