Measures

When you want to see how your business is doing, you typically review analytics to find out "how much" or "how many." Keeping on top of this kind of summary data helps you to evaluate your company's performance.

To get the exact summaries you need, you specify the date and number fields in your custom subject areas that you want to summarize, and you also specify how you want to summarize them. These fields are called measures.

What's a Measure?

Measures are a set of functions applied to a date or number field so that your users can see summaries in their analytics. Examples of typical measures include a SUM of the revenue in Euros, or a COUNT of the number of opportunities worth over $500,000.

When you create a custom subject area, you pick the aggregation function (SUM, COUNT, and so on) for measures. You can apply these functions on fields of type Date, Numeric, or Currency. After you define the measures for the required fields and publish the custom subject area, you can select these fields and the applied measures when creating analytics in BI Composer.

Tip: The measures you define in Application Composer display in the Facts folder in BI Composer.

Things to Remember

You can specify measures only when creating a custom subject area. You can't delete measures in an already published custom subject area, but you can add new measures. You can't edit or add measures to a standard, prebuilt subject area.

If you don't define a measure, then one will be automatically selected from the lowest object in the custom subject area when you submit the subject area for publication.

Measures and Field Types

Select measures based on your reporting needs. For example, you can use measures to view product sales per store, state, or country. Or, use measures to view the number of support tickets opened or closed per day, week, or month, and so on. But keep in mind, the measures available for selection might differ depending on the field type.

Here are some measures you can apply to fields of type Numeric, Currency, or Date.

• For Numeric and Currency fields, a measure can be:

  • All

    Note: All isn't a measure, but an option in the UI that selects all of the measures.

  • Sum: Calculates the sum of the values.

  • Average: Calculates the mean value.

  • Count: Calculates the number of rows that aren't null.

  • Count Distinct: Calculates the number of rows that aren't null. Each distinct occurrence of a row is counted only once.

    Note: Although Count Distinct is usually used in cases requiring a count on a foreign key (because a count of distinct rows is what's wanted), it's not required. If your requirements allow multiple instances of the same foreign key value to be counted multiple times, you can use Count rather than Count Distinct.

  • Maximum: Calculates the highest numeric value.

  • Minimum: Calculates the lowest numeric value.

  • First: Selects the first occurrence of the item.

  • Last: Selects the last occurrence of the item.

  • Median: Calculates the middle value.

  • Standard Deviation: Calculates the standard deviation to show the level of variation from the average.

  • Standard Deviation Population: Calculates the standard deviation using the formula for population variance and standard deviation.

• For Date fields, a measure can be:

  • All

  • Maximum

  • Minimum