Getting More Out of Filtered Portals in Version 11

[comment]

I may add some notes later.

CrossTab11.zip

[LaRetta]

Oh, this is sweet - no additional relationships; one standard summary (which most of our tables contain anyway). Thank you for providing this, Michael.

It is amazing how little overhead and effort it requires to implement. But it still required elegant thinking to make it this simple.

Edited May 4, 2010 by Guest

[bruceR]

Very nice!

[Reinder]

Very nice, but it breaks on the same issue as always: don't try it with a lot of related records.

When I use only 10.000 child records, loading time per parent record goes up to more than 5 seconds....

But still, good thinking!

[RodSierra]

A very nice use of this feature, no doubt, but all these are unstored calcs...correct? Not sure of process efficiency in a large record count situations. Too bad the filter could not be referenced to a stored type calculation, updated when necessary, or can it?

[comment]

FMI Inc. in their wisdom gave us PORTAL filtering, NOT relationship filtering. Since portals are layout devices, the filtering works on presentation level, not data level. This, I believe, has certain implications that are worth keeping in mind - the first and foremost being that filtering does NOT use the field index.

The "unindexed" aspect of filtering is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it allows you to set up the filtering criteria as an "unstored calculation". This opens up a lot of new avenues that were previously impossible or cumbersome, e.g. filtering based on PatternCount().

On the other hand, it also means that every time the join cache is refreshed, the filter must be re-evaluated for every child record, thus making the technique unsuitable for large related sets.

[Søren Dyhr]

FMI Inc. in their wisdom gave us PORTAL filtering, NOT relationship filtering.

Shouldn't it be ENDLESS wisdom? : ... in it's proverbial origin?

--sd

[comment]

I believe it's actually "infinite" - and there is such a thing as an allusion...

[LaRetta]

Indeed ... everything (including friendship) is finite and thinking otherwise is the great illusion.

[comment]

I said "allusion", not "illusion"...

But otherwise I am inclined to agree with you and Einstein:

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alberteins100015.html

[Søren Dyhr]

I believe it's actually "infinite" - and there is such a thing as an allusion... ...

Ah yes it is ...it's two words in english but just one in danish, by the way where is the difference actually beyond first having it's origin in old norse and the other in latin? Is it that the former is only seemingly ...or?

--sd

[comment]

I believe these are synonyms, but my dictionary suggests "endless" is less formal and broader in scope, extending to both space and time. Thus God is "eternal", the universe may be "infinite", and suffering is "endless".

BTW, "finis" too is a Latin word.

[cavenewt]

Semantic tangents aside...and I hope too much time hasn't gone by to get a response...

 

I'm trying to deconstruct this implementation of crosstabs. How do I get at the 30+ invisible portals? I know their details from the DDR, but would sure like to see how the hiding was done.

 

Thanks

[bruceR]

There are no invisible portals in the example file.

 

Every rectangle is a single-row, filtered portal.