Duplicate Members

Duplicate members are base members (not shared members) that store data and have identical names. Oracle Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management supports duplicate members across different dimensions but not duplicate members within the same dimension.

Duplicate dimension members are useful in cases where costs are tracked as they move from a source organization unit to a destination organizational unit, and it is necessary to report on the costs moved between the sources and targets.

While Profitability and Cost Management supports duplicate members, there are challenges created by using them. In Oracle Essbase, the data cells containing data must be uniquely identified. When no duplicate members are used, the system uses the member name combination to identify a cell.

With duplicate members, a further qualification is required. For example, instead of referring to a data cell organization member (for example, "Marketing") the reference must also include the dimension (for example, "Entity.TotalEntitiy.Administration.Marketing"). The finer qualification required for duplicate members can cause issues when creating reports and modifying dimensions, particularly in moving members. When a duplicate member is moved, its fully qualified name has changed. This causes the Database Redeploy process to be unable to find a proper cell for data after modifying the dimension, and will result in dropped data values.

Rather than creating duplicate dimensions, you should prefix the members of one or both dimensions to avoid creating duplicates.