What Are a Physical Table's General Properties?

This topic contains information about the properties that you assign to your imported, added, or aliased physical tables.

See Create a Physical Table and Populate Physical Columns with a Stored Procedure or Select Statement.

Property	Description
Source	Specifies how the physical table's columns get their data. For an alias table, you can't change the table's source option, but you can click Replace... to change the source table. For an imported or newly added table, select Table if you need to add columns to match those in a corresponding data source table. You might use this options when you need to add physical columns because a data source's table isn't finalized and available for import, or if the administrator has added more columns to a data source's table. After you select this option, you use the Columns tab to create the needed columns. For an imported or added table, select Stored Procedure or Select Statement to use a stored procedure or select statement to populate the physical table's columns. After you select this option, you use the Columns tab to write the default or database-specific stored procedure or select statement and to create the needed columns. See Populate Physical Columns with a Stored Procedure or Select Statement.
Dynamic Name	Displays the name of the session variable used to name the table. This option is available if you selected Table in the Source field. Available for imported or added tables. You can choose Use Dynamic Name to select between primary and shadow tables that are valid at different times in the ETL cycle. In both cases, you can assign session variables to dynamically select the appropriate table.
Caching	Specifies if and how the table's data is cached. Typically you cache data when the table doesn't need to be accessed in real time. Select Same cache setting as source so that the alias table uses the same caching preference as its source table. If you select this option then the source's caching option is displayed next to the field. For example, (Cache forever). Select Do not cache to not cache the table. Select Cache forever so that the table entry cache doesn't automatically expire. This option is useful when a table is important to a large number of queries that users might run. For example, if most queries have a reference to an account object, keeping it cached indefinitely could actually improve performance rather than compromise it. Selecting this option doesn't mean that an entry always remains in the cache. Other invalidation techniques, such as manual purging, LRU (Least Recently Used) replacement, metadata changes, or use of the cache polling table can result in entries being removed from the cache. Select Cache for to specify how long the table entries are persisted in the query cache. Setting a cache persistence time is useful for data sources that are updated frequently. For example, you could set this option to refresh the underlying physical tables daily for a particular workbook or dashboard. If a query references multiple physical tables with different persistence times, the cache entry for the query exists for the shortest persistence time set for any of the tables referenced in the query. This makes sure that no subsequent query gets a cache hit from an expired cache entry.
SQL Hint	Contains instructions that tell the data source query optimizer the most efficient way to run the SQL statement. See About Hints in SQL Statements.
Join Keys	Displays the table's keys that are used in joins to other physical tables. Join keys are automatically created when you import joined data source tables and when you create or modify physical table joins. Use the physical diagram to update joins. See About Physical Joins.
Additional Keys	Displays a list of keys that, in addition to the join keys, defines identifier columns for the table.