UDAs enable you to select and report on data based on a common characteristic. UDAs are useful when performing member selections from an outline with an unbalanced hierarchy (in which the members of a dimension do not have identical member levels). You can set UDAs on the server for characteristics such as color, size, gender, flavor, or any other common member characteristics. You must have Database Manager permissions to set UDAs on the server.
UDAs are different from attributes. UDAs are member labels that you create to extract data based on a particular characteristic, but you cannot use UDAs to group data, to perform crosstab reporting, or to retrieve data selectively. For data analysis, UDAs are not as powerful as attributes.
You can use the UDA command with Boolean operators to refine report queries. See Selecting Members by Using Boolean Operators for examples.
Also see Creating UDAs.
In large outlines (for example, with one million or more members), in which many members (for example, half a million members) are assigned to one UDA, querying member sets by UDA can take a long time. To improve the query performance, set the PRELOADUDANAMESPACE configuration setting in essbase.cfg to TRUE. Additional memory might be required for loading the application. See the Oracle Essbase Technical Reference.
To select members based on a UDA, at the point in the script where you want to select members based on the UDA, use the format:
<UDA (dimensionName,"UDAstring")
where dimensionName is the dimension of the member that you select, and UDAstring is the UDA that is set on the server. The following example selects members of the Product dimension with the Sweet attribute.
<UDA (product,"Sweet")
When you run the report script, Essbase incorporates the UDA members into the final report.