FCCS - Blocks

Those who are coming to FCCS from Essbase or Planning know all about blocks. But for those coming from HFM or Enterprise or MicroControl, blocks are a new concept.

BRIEFLY, blocks are how data is stored in FCCS. A block is a combination of any stored sparse and dense member. Each combination of stored sparse dimensions is a separate block. But all members in a dense dimension is stored in one block. In FCCS, the Account dimension is the only dense dimension, so all accounts are in the block for a given combination of sparse dimensions.

Blocks get automatically created when loading data but not with calculations. You write a perfect calc, deploy, consolidate, and get no result. It looks like the calc either didn't run or didn't work. What actually happened is the calc worked but since there was no block there was no place to store the result.

So, what to do? On the rule insertion points, there is an option to enable automatic block creation.

On the bottom right of the above screenshot, you'll see an option to auto create blocks. Clicking No will change it to Yes with the following warning.

So now when you consolidate, the calc will run as before but now there will be a place to store the data.

There are other ways to create blocks, but this is the simplest (other than loading data).