Pie charts are casting judgement on my DB structure...

Stephen Johnson shared this question 6 years ago
Answered

I've got a table in my database that stores employee payroll information by month. The table has an employee column, month column, and one column for each type of time that we track (standard time, vacation time, sick time, overtime, etc.).

When I pulled this data into Yellowfin I started building a report that would allow me to aggregate our time measures across employees, months, or both. When I went to generate a pie chart to show the proportion of the different kinds of time, I learned that the Yellowfin pie charts only accept one metric/dimension for "size" and one metric for "color". In other words, to get this pie chart to work I would have to restructure my database table to have four columns: employee, month, time type (standard, overtime, sick, etc.), and a time amount field. Then I could choose time type as my color metric and time amount as my size.

Alternatively I suppose I could switch my view to freehand SQL and do this massaging there, but all the Yellowfin material I've read has advised against freehand SQL since that diminishes Yellowfin optimizations...

Any advice?

Replies (4)

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Hi Stephen,

yes you are correct, Yellowfin's Pie Chart only allows one field for the Colour and one field for Size.

Did you consider using the Multi Pie chart because that chart permits you to have more than one field for the Size?

Otherwise, your idea of using a freehand SQL view to rearrange the data structure is a at least worth a try - you never know, the functionality that freehand SQL views offer you may be enough for all of your requirements.

regards,

David

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Hi Stephen,

just wondering how you got on with this?

regards,

David

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I wound up having to restructure the way I was putting my data together to work with the pie chart the way it wants.

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I see...the top-down approach (or is that bottom-up?)

Thanks for letting me know!

regards,

David

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