Shalini

• Dec 10th, 2015

 

Alias will not effect whereas Reference will get effected

Shiv Tripathy

• Jan 4th, 2016

 

Reference shortcuts are created during the design of the presentation layer during the star ans snowflake schema grouping,i.e focused namespaces, the fact and dimensions will be present in the development layer and will be referenced in the presentation layer,thus called as reference shortcuts,
presentation layer will contain only the shortcuts.
Alias shortcuts will be present in the same dimension as that of the original and will be used for the multiple roles played by a single physical dimension.. for e.g time dimension,
for eg. order fact may have order date, sales date,inventory date..
so all the three roles will have 3 separate iterations of time dimension modeled for each specific role,
*time dimension is a role playing dimension

Sai Nandigam

• Jan 31st, 2016

 

Regular shortcut is as reference to the target object. Alias shortcut is like a copy of the original object with completely independent behavior. Alias shortcut is available only for query subjects and dimensions.
Regular shortcut is typically used as conformed dimension with star schema groups, creating multiple references with the same name and appearance in multiple places. In the example below, the shortcuts for Products and Order Time are created in two groups: Product Forecast and Sales Target.
Note: If a query is written to use Products shortcut from both Product Forecast and Sales Target, the query uses the definition of Products only once in the query.
Alias shortcut is typically used in role-playing dimensions or shared tables. In this example, Sales Staff and Sales Branch can be treated as different hierarchies. If we need to report orders against Sales Branch and Sales Staff independently as well as together, we need to create an alias to Sales Branch that can be used as a level in the Sales Staff hierarchy.

RemyaG

• Feb 3rd, 2016

 

A regular shortcut (Reference) is nothing but a simple reference to another object. Its a soft link.
An Alias shortcut is a copy of an existing object and is treated independantly.
It is easier to see the difference when you generate a query based out of a reference vs a query based out of Alias. The query behaviour with that of a reference, will have only the reference of the source table (which the reference is shortcut to) where as in an Alias, the alias shortcut will be an independant table - similar to creating a self join to a table with a different name