This article is part of a series on Polaris best practices. Click here for more Community content or visit Anapedia for detailed technical guidance.
In this article we’ll review some of the blueprint insights available to help you optimize and improve efficiency in your Polaris models.
Blueprints Insights defined
Polaris provides additional columns in the blueprint view beyond the cell count column you may already be familiar with. We refer to these columns as “blueprint insights” throughout the Polaris content. These insights include populated cell count, memory used, calculation complexity, and calculation effort.
These columns provide valuable insights into the potential performance of your models. Understanding and interpreting what these metrics are showing will help you identify opportunities to improve efficiency and optimization in your Polaris models. Let’s look at these blueprint insights in a Polaris model.
Blueprints Insights example
There are a number of new columns in the Polaris blueprint view. Use the below screenshot when reviewing the definitions:
- Cell count: You may be familiar already with the cell count. This shows the total size of the multi-dimensional space. In the example above that’s 15,453 cells. This is determined by the size of the dimensions this module is using, but in Polaris it does not equate to memory used.
- Populated cell count: Tells you the size of the populated space. These are the cells that have non-default values in this dimensional space. In the example, 118 out of the 15,453 is a much smaller number. The populated cell count is very important to pay attention to because it drives memory used.
- Memory used: Is the real-time memory consumption of the line item. This will also tell you the total memory used if there are multiple line items in the module.
- Calculation complexity: Gives you information about the type of calculation that you are working with. Here, we are doing a calculation where we’re taking our sales actuals and multiplying that by a rate for our products. This is resulting in a one-to-many calculation.
- Calculation effort: Tells you what percent of the overall CPU time in the last 10 minutes this line item is using. In this case, it is quite small.
These columns are also visible in the “Line Items” tab in the “Modules” section for all line items within a model.
Video
This concept is also explained in the following video:
……………..
Authors:
Anaplan’s Theresa Reid (@TheresaR), Architecture and Performance Director; Stephen Rituper (@Stephen), Sr. Director, OEG; and Terry Archsmith (@TerryA), Sr. Director, Platform Training.
