Appending a field Month to an IDEA Database

Hello Group Members,

 

Many a times we are required to append a field ‘Month’ to an IDEA database so as to perform month based Analytics on the underlying data.

 

As an example - we append a field ‘Month’ to a Logistics data file to arrive at the Count and Value of Revenue Earned on a particular Route for a particular Month for specific Products.

 

Now while appending the field ‘Month’ using Data and Append, you may be naturally inclined to set the field type as Virtual Character to get the values in the field as January, February etc. However the @month(Date) Criteria we use in IDEA to get the field ‘Month’ is a numerical month like 1,2 etc.

 

So we can make a mental note of appending a virtual numeric field for ‘Month’

 

On a side note - the same nicety holds good for fields to append - ‘Year’, ‘Quarter’, ‘Day of Week’, and ‘Date’.

 

Best Regards

 

Group Admin Team