Data Slices

Data Slices

Use

You use a data slice to partition your dataset into subsets. You need data slices if:

You want to protect your data from changes
You want an overview of the completeness of the data transferred, from other companies for example.
You want to delete certain data before you import new data

The official figures for last month are submitted by the companies of a group. The companies should not make any more changes to last month’s data. Corrections may only be made by the responsible person. The companies may, however, report on the data.

The relevant data slice is ‘open for update’ until the key date when the companies have submitted their data. After the key date, the status is changed by the system administration to ‘only responsible person may change’. Other users’ authorization to report on this data remains unaffected.

Using the statistics, the responsible person can check if companies have not yet submitted their data.

Plant 009 was sold. No more data may be posted for this plant. You create a data slice in which you specify the characteristic value plant 009. Then you lock the data slice for any changes. This way no new data may be posted for the plant. You may, however, report on the old data.

Features

You can assign a data slice to one or more aspects. You can also assign comment tables to a data slice. The characteristics of the aspect, or of the comment table, describe the conditions for the transfer or maintenance of the data. You can restrict the characteristics by entering characteristic values, intervals or variables.

The authorization protection is determined by the assignment of users and a responsible person to the data slice. You manage the data slice using various statuses. If the data slice is open for update, all assigned users may change the corresponding data. If it is locked, no users may change the data in the data slice. As a third possibility, only the responsible person may make changes.

If you attempt to manually change data in a locked data slice, the system produces an error message. You may not change the data. If you attempt to automatically transfer locked data, the data will be stored temporarily but not posted. A corresponding message is written in the log. From within the log you can analyse the errors and update the data, but only when the data slice is open again.

Note that the data slices may not be used in archiving.