IBM Support

TR1901 The number of children (or parents) of a category cannot exceed 65,536

Troubleshooting


Problem

An error occurs when building the Cognos PowerCube in Transformer.

Symptom

English:

  • (TR1901) The number of children (or parents) of a category cannot exceed 65,536 when building Cube.
  • (TR1901) PDS-PPE-0130 The number of children or parents of a category cannot exceed 65,536.

German:
  • (TR1901) Die Anzahl der Kinder (oder Eltern) einer Kategorie kann 65.536 nicht übersteigen.

Cause

This message indicates that an internal limit has been reached. The current rule is that no one category can have more than 65,000 (approximately) categories attached to it.

A ratio of category to children to be between 1:7 to 1:10 is recommended.

Resolving The Problem

The only real solution is to restructure the model so that the limit is no longer an issue. This is possible by adding levels within the dimension where the limit occurs.

You can view the log file to see which approximate dimension is causing this issue.

Here is an example of the structure of the hierarchy in a model.

Dimension Category Count
Level 1: 2 members
Level 2: 2 members
Level 3: 10 members
Level 4: 187,000 members

Although it looks like a limit is being hit with the lowest level at 187,000 categories, if you divide this number by the number of parents (which is 10) at the next level, there are only 20,000 categories per parent.

There are two other instances where this error will occur.

  1. The model has levels suppressed. When suppressing a category in a model Transformer essentially attaches any children of the suppressed category to its parent. We still have to put the leaf level in the cube (even if it is suppressed) but they are marked as hidden and then attached to the visible parents higher up in the hierarchy.
  2. If your organization changes, your model may contain inactive categories that are no longer needed. Delete these inactive categories as follows:

    From the Tools menu, click Clean House.
    In the Date field, type a date in YYYYMMDD format.

    All categories that have been inactive from the specified date to the present are deleted.

Following technique can be apply as well.

Create a new level to the dimension to group the data in alphabets order to bring down the category ratio for the dimension.
If the category value is numeric then add a new level with a calculated column. It can be grouped by using following expressing

floor( ID_column * 0.001)

Note: This limit exists in all Versions including PowerPlay Transformer 6.6, Transformer 7.x, Transformer 8.x and Transformer 10.x

[{"Product":{"code":"SSEP7J","label":"Cognos Business Intelligence"},"Business Unit":{"code":"BU059","label":"IBM Software w\/o TPS"},"Component":"Transformer","Platform":[{"code":"PF002","label":"AIX"},{"code":"PF010","label":"HP-UX"},{"code":"PF016","label":"Linux"},{"code":"PF027","label":"Solaris"},{"code":"PF033","label":"Windows"}],"Version":"10.2.2;10.2.1;10.2;10.1.1;10.1;8.4.1;8.4;8.3","Edition":"","Line of Business":{"code":"LOB10","label":"Data and AI"}},{"Product":{"code":"SSTQPQ","label":"IBM Cognos Series 7 PowerPlay"},"Business Unit":{"code":"BU053","label":"Cloud & Data Platform"},"Component":"Transformer","Platform":[{"code":"PF002","label":"AIX"},{"code":"","label":"HP-UX on PA-RISC"},{"code":"PF027","label":"Solaris"},{"code":"PF033","label":"Windows"}],"Version":"7.5","Edition":"","Line of Business":{"code":"LOB10","label":"Data and AI"}}]

Historical Number

1030043

Document Information

Modified date:
15 June 2018

UID

swg21341611