Understanding PeopleSoft Metadata
Metadata is data that defines data. Metadata conveys information about how data is formatted, structured, and stored. In an OLAP cube, metadata defines dimensions, levels, members, member attributes, and interrelationships of the cube. PeopleSoft Cube Builder uses two types of PeopleSoft structures—trees and queries—to define cubes.
PeopleSoft Trees
A PeopleSoft tree defines the summarization rules for a database field. It specifies, for purposes of reporting or security access, how the field values are grouped in the system.
For example, the values of the DEPTID field might identify individual departments in your organization. You could build a tree for the DEPTID field, which defines the organizational hierarchy that specifies how each department relates to the others: departments 10700 and 10800 report to the same manager, department 20200 is part of a different division, and so on.
You can easily see how you can use PeopleSoft trees to define a cube structure. Like cube dimensions, trees consist of levels and members. (In PeopleSoft Tree Manager, members are called nodes and leaves.)
PeopleSoft Queries
PeopleSoft queries are SQL statements that are created by PeopleSoft Query. You can use these SELECT statements to return field values based on certain criteria. The standard PeopleSoft security mechanism can secure the data returned by PeopleSoft Query. Also, PeopleSoft Query can return data in any of the database-supported globalized formats.
You can use queries in a number of ways to define an OLAP cube. Finally, you can use queries to populate OLAP cubes with data; the query results are the rows of data that fill the cells of the cube.