Catalog Surprises

It’s amazing how far you can push OBIEE. This week we saw a blog about copying a page on it’s own, no dashboard, just a page.

One of the methods I like to use is keep all the dashboard, analysis, prompts and filters for a ‘dashboard’, in a set of sub folders, in one folder.

For example, Folder A has sub folders, Analyses, Dashboard, Prompts, Filters, Lists, Summaries, etc

The problem with this approach is that Answers does not easily deal with shared Filters that are not in the ‘Subject Area Contents’ folder.

But that is easy to get around, just edit the xml on the Analyses that want to access the shared filter and add an entry to the filters section, which refers to your filter. Voila.

Other tips we picked up this week are from the many great blogs out there, such as those below. We don’t always agree with other methods, many being touted as ‘best practice’, but it is useful to see other peoples ideas.

My only pet hate is when people blog or comment on using the tmp folder in the Weblogic server – my ‘best practice’ would be to always define your own styles and skins.

Blogs of the week

1. Continuous Delivery of Analytics and BI: Part 1

Stewart Bryson writes, “The folks setting the pace for analytics and BI delivery need to get with the program. The landscape has shifted; we no longer live in a time when IT can say “they’ll get it when they get it””

2. ODI Lineage Reporting

Pete Bunning says, “The question of giving users access to lineage metadata has come up a couple of times recently. One solution is to use the Metadata dictionary as described by my colleague Simon here. On the other hand if you are using ODI to populate your warehouse there is another option which will give you lineage from the database column right through to the presentation columns in OBIEE.”

He writes that it’s helpful to have an overview of the process before you start. The set up involves 3 steps which he plans to cover in separate blogs.

3. Testing Times

Pete blogs, “We all test our stuff before we put it into production, don’t we? Oh, that’s not a 100% “Yes, of course! that I hear”. I know, testing is hard, it takes time, and besides it never finds the bugs. There are so many kinds of tests that it is confusing.”

4. Adding Common Columns to Tables via Templates and Transformation Scripts

Jeff Smith writes, “In Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler, you can create a table in your relational design that stores columns that you want to be added to all of your other tables.”

Read on for more details…

5. DATAEXPORT FIX on DynamicCalc Sparse Member

Celvin writes, “You might have seen this and have a workaround for this. However it is a surprise that it cannot work.” !!

6. 2015 Buzzwords and Trends in EPM

Eric Helmer names Buzzwords and Trends include:

“Big Data”
“Internet of Things”
“Digital Disruption”

7. The new (and improved) EPM documentation portal

Cameron Lackpour writes, “In my experience (or at least memory, which, as you will read below, is perhaps not iron trap-like) there have been three major iterations of the EPM documentation portal under Oracle’. Arbor and Hyperion Solutions had documentation before that, but recalling documentation portals from before 2004 (2006?) is simply beyond me.”

He looks at the new documentation and says, ” These are all incremental improvements but those improvements add up to a much easier and handier interface and thus quicker access to the information that we all need.”

8. BI Forum 2015

In this blog post, Gerd talks about how he is very pleased about getting voted from the audience to speak at the BI Forum 2015 (May 6th-8th 2015).

The topic will be “Driving OBIEE Join Semantics on Multi Star Queries as User”

The abstract:

One of the most powerful OBIEE functionality is the ability for users to query several star schemas (multi star queries). Most likely users will use non-conforming dimensions in such a case to filter specific data. Doing so since OBIEE 11.1.1.7 sql generator engine changed the semantic how results are joined. This presentation gives a complete introduction of the possibilities coming along and shows how users can drive inner, left and full outer joins between multi star queries. Presentation will close with a potential bug discussion in the OBIEE sql generator engine.

9. Correct order by Month date in OBIEE

This article says, “When you add a column with MON or MONTH date format in OBIEE report its values would be sorted alphabetically, not by the month number order. This way December would come before January etc. To sort by months in their correct order we need a date in a month number format (1 for January, 2 for February etc.). There are 2 solutions for this.”

These are: