Title: CA Clarity Tuesday Tip: Time Slicing 101 - Part 1
CA Clarity Tuesday Tip by Shawn Moore, Sr. Principal Support Engineer for 5/03/2011
In this series, I'm going to start with a very basic description of blobs and time slicing. This will seem basic to some of you who have been working with Binary Objects, but it will get much more in depth over the next couple parts. Some of this article was derived from the actual installation guide and one of our in house experts, Kathy Fisher. I've added my 2 cents worth as well.
A time slice table is a flat table that contains data that is derived from a sliced binary large object ( BLOB ). A BLOB is a collection of binary data that is stored as a single entity in a database. Clarity uses BLOBs to store curve and calendar data.
Clarity’s data model contains several BLOBs that cannot be read by most reporting tools. Time slicing extracts data into a readable flat table. You can then query the time slice to run reports from the database. For more information about running reports, see "Reports and Jobs".
If you were to look at a blob in it's raw form it might look like:
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
That blob represents 32 hours of time entry data on a timesheet. In the corresponding slice tables it may produce records such as:
2010-11-15 00:00:00.000
8.0
2010-11-16 00:00:00.000
8.0
2010-11-19 00:00:00.000
8.0
2010-11-15 00:00:00.000
8.0
You can determine which objects are time-sliced and the frequency with which this is done. Time slicing is performed by the Time Slicing job.
Each record in the time slice table contains an object ID that corresponds to a data element. The report writer uses these object IDs to identify the resource associated with the slice record. To define how you want time slice data to appear in Clarity, see the Clarity Studio Developer’s Guide for details.
Next week, well look at the slice characteristics in more depth and look at a more realistic example and how it goes from the source data (the parent object) to the slicing tables.
-shawn