Complex Expansion - Help

Thanks a lot Dan Norton this was pretty much what I was looking for. A big thanks to Daniel Stafford for his very interesting set of documents on ViPR SRM :-)

First, there's the Eastside Geek blog (Eastside Geek), which is written by Daniel Stafford, an EMC SE, and covers a lot of teritory, including ViPR SRM reporting.  There's at least one post that uses a complex expansion (Change Rate Estimator - Eastside Geek), but I would use the search box and look for ViPR SRM; everything he's written is highly informative.  He has also written a white paper, Asking the Hard Questions: Reporting in ViPR SRM, which I highly recommend.

With that out of the way, I have to tell you that complex expansions are complicated.  They are providing the equivalent of SQL JOINs.  Inner joins, outer joins, all sorts of joins.  I think the idea is to make things simple for people who don't know SQL, but speaking as someone who does, I can sometimes find it confusing because it's trying to cover so much with one umbrella.  For a general question like yours, the best source of information is to take the ViPR SRM Reporting class.  It covers a lot of territory, including complex expansions.  If there's something specific you are having problems with, please post more details, and I'll see what I can do.

Thanks for your inputs Samuel Denton , I had referred to the Asking the Hard Questions, document by Daniel Stafford and I must admit that it was very informative and useful.

I do have SQL experience and my initial impressions about Complex expansions were the same a SQL joins, but like you said I do also get confused about this concept.

There are very many options for complex expansion in ViPR SRM (like split, in-list, regex etc) and I was looking for some examples / reports where these are used so that it gives me a better understanding.

For instance, one of the reports that I was trying to build was to map the servers (physical/vm's) to their corresponding storage arrays and capacity used in a table report.