1. Building Semantic Models in Oracle Analytics Server
  2. Create and Build Your Model
  3. Build a Semantic Model's Presentation Layer
  4. About Alternative Names for Presentation Objects

About Alternative Names for Presentation Objects

Use alternative names to help track an object's name changes and to prevent SQL queries that include the object's previous name from failing.

Semantic Modeler doesn't create an alias when you change a presentation object's name. If you need to track an object's previous names, then Oracle recommends that you create and manage alternative names for the object. When you rename a presentation object, you can create alternative names for the object to prevent breaking references that any existing requests have to the old names, including requests from workbooks, analyses, dashboards, reports, or other Logical SQL clients.

For example, suppose you have a subject area called Sample Sales Reduced that contains a presentation table called Facts Other. If you rename the table's presentation column # of Customers to Number of Customers, any requests that use # of Customers fail. However, if you add a # of Customers alternative name to the Number of Customers column object, then queries containing both # of Customers and Number of Customers succeed and return the same results.

Because presentation layer objects are often deleted and then re-created during the semantic model development process, it's best to wait until your logical business model is relatively stable before renaming and creating alternative names for presentation objects.

Note the following information when working with alternative names:

  • Alternative names for presentation objects aren't displayed in the subject areas that users access to create visualizations and analyses. Also, alternative names aren't displayed in other query clients used to create queries. End users and users who write queries only use the assigned names of subject areas, hierarchies, levels, tables, and columns.

  • Alternative names work differently than SQL aliases or the alias feature in the physical layer. Alternative names provides synonyms for object names, much like synonyms in SQL.

  • You can't rename a presentation object to a name that's already in use as an alias for an object of the same type.

  • You can use alternative names in Logical SQL queries.