2.02-19 Don't daisy chain data

rob_marshall

Always refer back to the ultimate source if possible, to avoid creating more dependencies than necessary.  This allows more parallel calculations to be run increasing efficiency and speeding up calculations

 

Best Practices article:
Best Practices for Module Design

Misbah

Rule 2.02-19 Don’t daisy chain data. Always refer back to the ultimate source if possible, to avoid creating more dependencies than necessary.  This allows more parallel calculations to be run increasing efficiency and speeding up calculations. It goes against PEFORMANCE elements of PLANS if you wish to go against this rule

Here is how it was done in Pre Planual Era:

Let’s say we have a line item called Volumes and we feed this into an Input module for reference. We also reference Volumes in the Calculation modules and Output Reports. You can see that the Volumes line item in the Outputs module is dependent on the Calculations module line item, which is in turn dependent on Input, and so on. It is a long dependency chain that has to be calculated in sequence.

 

What is wrong with this method?  One change in the source and the entire set of calculations have to be run in SEQUENCE causing delay.

Here is how it should be done in Planual Way:

You can see that all three downstream line items reference the Data module and can thus be calculated in parallel, reducing the dependency chain and maximizing the efficiency of the Anaplan calculation engine.