Overview of the dimensional viewer in Toad Data Point

Hello out there in data land. My name is Robert Pound, and I am a product technologist from Quest. In this video, I'd like to talk to you about the dimensional viewer in Toad Data Point. Understanding and combining data are two of the major endeavors at the front end of any data analysis task. Toad Data Point address these issues in a number of ways. However, the focus of this video will be on the dimensional viewer. Highlights of the dimensional viewer include the automatic parsing of data fields, the capability to aggregate your data in a number of ways, the ability to create calculated fields as well as roll-ups of your data, and the power to share your insights with your team in a number of different ways. Now, let's walk through the tool and see some of the features in action. First off, how do you open a dimensional viewer? There are several options. From the Object Explorer, you can right click and choose Dimensional Viewer. Or from the ribbon bar, you can choose Dimensional Viewer. But chances are if you're using the dimensional viewer, you already have a query that you want to further investigate. So either from a editor or a query builder file, you can right click on the results set, choose Send To, and choose Dimensional View. This will open up a new tab with the data that you want to investigate. The toolbars at the top and bottom allow you to access to tutorials, and arrange, and refresh your data on screen, and a number of options to export your data and save your data. The publish and export options are covered in another video, but you have the option to export, and save, and share in a number of different ways. So looking at the field list, there are three distinct types in the field list. The columns with the Q and an A in front of it are facts. And these are your finite values, such as state or city. You also have your dimensions or your measurements. These are denoted by the hash symbol. And then you also have dates, so as we talked about, dates are automatically parsed out into year, quarter, month, day, hour, minute, second, so that way you can pull and just those attributes without having to create a calculated column. You can also change the aggregation on any one of the dimensions. So currently, the aggregation by default is set to sum. But if you want to aggregate count, or if you want to change it to mean, et cetera, you can. For this data set, it's an order ID, so it's meant to be a fact. So I'm going to choose none for this one. You can also choose to create calculated columns. By default, there is a count of rows in the calculations. But if you wanted to create a calculated column for city for instance, you can choose Add Calculated Field. And then you have the ability to create your own custom formula from the wizard that opens up. You can also create roll-ups of your data. So looking at state for instance, if you wanted to roll this up into a new category, you could choose Create Roll-up and then highlight several of the items. In this case, I'm going to just choose the top seven or so and choose Add Roll-up, and I will change the name of this to my region, and click OK. Now all of those fields in the column will be a new roll-up called My Region. And if I wanted to again create a new roll-up, I could come here and choose region 1 And click. All others can be placed in other. So now you can come down and see. Everything's placed either in other, region 1, or region 2. And if I had made a mistake, I can correct it by simply choosing from the dropdown menu and modifying it. Now looking at the canvas, so we've seen the fields themselves. But now to drop them into the canvas, you simply drag and drop. And it will create a list. If you want to drag in dimensional data, in this case amount billed, I can drag it into this table as well and drop it in. And it's automatically rolling it up as a sum. If we want to create a separate table, for instance, the roll-up that I just created, I can drag this in onto the canvas as a separate table. And it will show my roll-ups that I did for the state. And again, dropping the amount billed on top of it will sum up for my new roll-ups, as opposed to by city or by state. You can also further filter this data by dropping a attribute or a field into this filter icon at the top. So now we can de-select all states in this case, or we can start parsing out certain states that are not of interest to us. You can also in the field list choose Filter, and it will also create a filter. So now we have two filters, and I switch between them by simply clicking at the bottom the attributes. So now we're on state, and I've switched to city. And once I have data that's of interest to me, like I mentioned earlier, we can share this out through Toad Intelligence Central Server. We can export it off as an Excel file. You can share it in a number of ways. And that's the general overview of the dimensional viewer in Toad Data Point. Hopefully this video helps you understand how you can use the dimensional viewer in Toad Data Point to understand your data. To give more information on this or other topics, you can check out the Toad Help File. There's a wealth of knowledge, including tutorials to help get you started. You can also check out the