Skipcheck in TM1 forces the TM1 engine to “skip the checking” of empty cells in a cube. For example, you have 30 days in a month and data in only 9 of them. Therefore only 9 cells are aggregated to get the total for the month. With the the skipping of blank cells disabled, all 30 cells would be checked to get the month total, making it three times more inefficient.
Skipcheck is part of the Sparse Consolidation engine that makes TM1 so extraordinarily fast.
Why is Skipcheck used?
A TM1 cube is constructed by putting a set of dimensions together. Dimensions usually contain rollups of elements. Information is entered at the base level and consolidate upwards through the rollup. For example, value might be entered at the day level and rolled up to Months and then to an element called “All Months”.
Once created, the Skipcheck function will make a TM1 cube automatically skip the calculation of empty cells. That is, until a rule is added. Rules allow us to do calculations more complicated than simple rollups. For example we could have a rule that says Sales = Units x Average Selling Price – clearly not a rollup. This addition of a rule turns off the automatic skipping of empty cells and thus diminishes the performance of the TM1 engine.
Where is Skipcheck used?
Skipcheck is almost always placed as the first item in a Rule sheet. Therefore it instructs TM1 to skip blank cells for the cube concerned.
Use with Feeders
Skipcheck is used in conjunction with Feeders to force TM1 to open intersections that would have otherwise not been used for a calculation. The Feeder “feeds” the otherwise empty cells, opening them for calculation and thus making them not skipped.
