Determining Which Attribute Elements Are Displayed: Attribute Joins

For business attribute data, the most common types of joins are inner joins and outer joins. An inner join includes in the data calculation only the data common to all the attribute elements in the join, while an outer join includes all of the data in all of the attribute elements.

Understanding the details of attribute joins requires that you have a basic understanding of SQL and of the tables in your data warehouse.

You can create an outer join on data coming from your data warehouse tables, for certain attributes on a report. You can also choose how the data warehouse table and final SQL pass result table are joined, and then determine the type of join, inner or outer, between specific attributes.

The image below shows the attribute join type setting in the Report Data Options dialog box. Each join type is described with an example in the next section, Understanding Attribute Join Types.