Overview
The Slice & Dice tool allows users to dig much deeper into the data from their game, finding insights that will allow you to improve the retention and monetisation and address questions such as:
- Is the mission difficulty correctly balanced?
- What items are being sold?
- How much virtual currency is being consumed?
This tool runs against your HOT game data and is subject to any data retention policies on your game. You can access any events and parameters sent from your game and use them to build custom tables and charts.
Query Management
The toolbar at the top of the page provides functions to manage your Slice & Dice queries. You can create New queries and give them a friendly Name. Your queries can be Saved & Loaded again at a later date. The button to Run your query is at the far right of the toolbar and you can export the results of your query as a JPG, PDF or SQL. Exported SQL can be used in Direct Access to run the query from your preferred SQL management tool.
Query Results
The results of your query will be displayed in the central panel as either a table or a chart.
you can toggle between table and chart display
and choose the type of chart.
You can maximize your query results area by sliding the “Navigation” and “Dimensions & Measures” panels out of view using the controls highlighted below.
Building Queries
Queries are built by choosing the Dimensions and Measures you want to analyse and dragging and dropping them in to the Rows, Columns and Filters panels to construct your query.
Measures and dimensions that have been added to the Rows or Columns panels can be removed by clicking on their close icon 
and you can click on the vertical arrows to sort your query results on in ascending or descending order. When you place a measure or dimension in to the filters panel you can click on their magnifying glass icon 
to select what values you wish to filter on. If you get your rows and columns reversed you can use the swap button 
to swap their axis.
This simple drag and drop interface will let you quickly build simple or complex queries and easily drill into your player behaviours.
Example – Unique users per acquisition channel
You want to see how many unique users have started playing your game from each of your acquisition channels.
- Click on the NEW query button in the toolbar
- Drag the Unique Users Measure in to the Columns panel
- Drag the Acquisition Channel Dimension in to the Rows panel
- Press the RUN button on the toolbar
This is a good start, you should see a table showing the number of unique users for each acquisition channel.
Let’s tidy it up a bit by removing the users with no acquisition channel and sorting the results in descending order. - Drag an additional Acquisition Channel Dimension into the Filters panel.
- Click on the magnifying glass icon to reveal the filter options
- Click the Add All button to move all acquisition channel dimension values to the Selected panel and click OK
Alternatively, you could have single or multi-selected individual values and used the Add button to select just the acquisition channel values you are interested in. - Click the lower sort arrow on the Unique Users measure that you placed in the columns panel to sort the results by the number of Unique Users in descending order.
- Press the RUN button on the toolbar.
Your display should look like the following.
- Click on the Untitled Query label in the toolbar and give your query a meaningful name.
- Press the SAVE button on the toolbar to save it
NB – Queries you save are shared between users on your account. - Click the Table / Chart toggle button to view your results as a Chart.
Your display should now look like the following.
Dimensions and Measures
Dimensions come in 3 flavours.
- Column Dimensions
The queries above have all used column dimensions. These are the dimensions that you will use most often, they contain the value of a database row from a specific Column.
e.g. missionName = “First Time User Forest” - Counter Dimensions
A Counter Dimension is used to attach a counter to an event row based on conditions that you define. The counter can then be used as a filter where you can then analyse another columns on the selected event.
e.g. A “First Time Deposit” counter dimension would put a counter on all transaction events from a user then you could filter your query to look at only the first transaction for each user. - Derived Dimensions
A Derived dimension is used when you want to create a new dimension by aggregating two existing dimensions.
e.g. Total Time Played / Number of Sessions = Average Session Length.
Column Dimensions
Column Dimensions are the event parameters you want to track. They refer to the names of the parameters 
Measures
Measures are the quantities of a parameter that you want to measure. Measures can be quantified 6 different ways MIN, MAX, COUNT, UNIQUE, SUM, AVERAGE 
A starting set of Measures and Dimensions are created when a game is added to the deltaDNA platform. They are based on the events and parameters that are added to each game by default.
Adding: As you add new events you can add new Dimensions and Measures to track them in. Click on the ADD Button 
below the Dimension or Measure selection list to create a new one. Then select the parameter, give it a friendly name and click Add
Date and Time dimensions can be modified if you want to focus on just one element of the Date/Time.
Measures can only be added after the corresponding Dimension has been Added
When you are adding a Measure, the aggregate selection list lets you specify how you want the measure to be counted.
NB – A count of UserID will count how many times the userID has recorded an event, e.g. one userID per event. To count the Unique users you need to count the number of UNIQUE userID.
Editing: Clicking on the Edit icon on a dimension or measure will let you alter or rename it. You may want to give some of your measures or dimensions friendlier names.
Remove : You can remove any Measures or Dimensions that aren’t being used by selecting them and clicking the Remove button. 
Counter Dimensions.
A Counter dimension lets you attach a counter to each event row that meets certain conditions that you specify. You can then use the counter to select specific rows and use these in your main query. The following example shows how build a query to find the first item that players are purchasing.
1) Create a new dimension by pressing the “Add” button and select “COUNTER” as the type of dimension.
2) Give the dimension a name, then add the conditions that will be used as event conditions, then press the green “Add” button to create your counter dimension.
3) Your Counter Dimension will appear at the bottom of your Dimensions list. Drag and Drop it into the Query Filter panel
4) Then click the magnifying glass icon and select First Purchase = 0, this will let us query the First Purchase transaction event for each user.
5) Add in the details for the columns and rows you want to query. In this case we want to look at the number of UniqueUsers purchasing each itemName
6) And run your query.
Note, a couple of other filters have been added to this one.
7) You can export the SQL from your query by clicking the 
export button on the toolbar if you want to see how the query was built and use it as the starting point for more sophisticated Direct Access queries.
Derived Dimensions.
You can build new derived dimensions calculated from existing dimensions or constants. Click on the Add button at the bottom of the Dimensions panel and select Derived from the Dimension Type drop down list.
Derived Measures.
It is also possible to create derived measures, calculated from existing measures, constants or other derived measures. Click on the Add button at the bottom of the Measures panel and select Derived from the Dimension Type drop down list.
Stacked Charts
Stacked charts can be created by selecting the 
stacked chart icon when there is more than one measure in your query.
It is also possible to create charts that are stacked by dimension however, you need to select which of your dimensions should be stacked by clicking on the relevant dimension in the Stack dimensions panel below the chart area.
