Rittman Mead Blog - Oracle BI Suite EE

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – Understanding Logical Calculations & Native DB Calculations – Repository Modeling

Ever wondered what is the actual difference between the logical calculated measures in the repository and the native DB calculated measures? I have had this question asked to me quite a few times in the recent past that i thought it made sense to create a separate blog entry for

Technical

Oracle Database Resource Manager and OBIEE

When putting together an OBIEE system, one common requirement from clients is to provide an enhanced level of service for particular groups of users. For example, you might want to define a "standard" group for regular OBIEE users, and a "management" group that gets allocated more

Technical

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – Level Based Measures & Grand Totals

One of the features that Oracle could add to BI EE, is in opening up the BI Server in the form of updatable APIs. Currently, the biggest stumbling block is if there are any lack of features we will have to completely depend on Oracle to add that feature. I

Technical

Regular Expressions in OBIEE

When reporting against an OLTP system, in many ways, OBIEE works like an ETL tool, transforming the source system data and presenting it as a star schema. After years of writing ETL code, if there's one thing I hate to be without, it's regular expressions. So,

Technical

Running the OBIEE Administratiol tool on Unix using Wine

The other day I was playing with getting OWB11gR2, which at the time of this writing, has only been released under Linux and Solaris, to run under Windows [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/12/10/owb11gr2-on-windows/]. In the pursuing comments Jon Mead threw down the gauntlet and asked if

Technical

Oracle EPM 11.1.1.3 - Installing Hyperion Components on Multiple Machines

In any EPM deployment, rarely do all the components get installed on a single machine. In majority of the cases, you will see that each component is actually installed on separate machines with their own application and web servers. So, how does this all work and how do we go

Technical

Cognos 8 & Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 - Reporting using Cognos on BI EE Metadata - BI Server ODBC

In the last blog entry i had given a high level overview of the various components comprising the Cognos 8 BI Suite. One of the most common questions that we tend to get in conferences is how do we go about using Cognos to report out of the model designed

Technical

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 & Essbase Connectivity – Enriching Essbase reports with relational attributes

If you had attended our training days event or one of our Open World sessions, you will have noticed that we had covered the various aspects of integration between Essbase and relational sources using BI EE. The presentations are available here [http://www.rittmanmead.com/articles/]. One of the scenarios

Technical

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – Single Table Repository Design – Modeling Statistics of common Sports – Tennis, Football etc – Part 2

In the last blog entry i had shown a simple scenario of creating a BMM layer for one physical table. In today’s entry i will be covering a practical use case of creating a BMM layer from one physical table. This is a very interesting use case and can

Technical

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – Single Table Repository Design – Part 1

One of the best ways to understand the BI EE repository design is to start designing the Business Model Layer for a single Physical table. Any person who is new to BI EE will always start with testing the repository for a single physical table. This is where BI EE

Technical

Inside Oracle's Analytic Applications for Financial Services

If you've been to any of the Oracle BI Applications roadmap presentations, you may well have seen a slide that sets out "Oracle's Integrated Analytic Solution", which looks like this: (from Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Roadmap, Oracle Open World 2009) Now we all know

Technical

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – Multi-Select Prompts, String Aggregation

One of the issues that people often face while using BI EE is the lack of control on Multi-Select prompts. One cannot set Multi-Select prompts to a presentation variable & similarly one cannot display the multi-selected values in a report (only filter view supports the display of all the selected

Technical

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 & Essbase Connectivity – Direct MDX Requests – Multiple Measure Dimensions, Varying Attributes & Format Strings

In the last blog entry, i had shown a very simple work around to use direct database requests in BI EE. This capability has quite a few advantages and actually provides a means wherein one can actually create reports using this, wherever BI Server directly cannot(due to inherent limitations

Technical

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – Direct Database Requests & Essbase - Workaround

I got an email (almost 2 weeks back) from one of the BI EE engineers who works on the BI EE – Essbase connectivity. Looks like one of the bugs that i had pointed out in a very old blog entry here [http://oraclebizint.wordpress.com/2008/08/07/bi-ee-10134-bi-publisher-and-mdx-essbase-connectivity/] has

Technical

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 and Essbase Connectivity – Fragmentation on Essbase Sources

In our BI EE – Essbase session in OOW, we covered 2 important use cases in bringing BI EE and Essbase together. They are 1. Horizontal Federation 2. Vertical Federation There is one more use case that only BI EE as a reporting tool can do on an Essbase source(not

Technical

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 & Essbase Connectivity – Time Based Aggregation and Multiple Queries

A good question came up on our OOW session the other day on BI EE & Essbase connectivity for a means of doing Time Based aggregation on Essbase cubes. Time Based aggregation is a pretty common requirement while doing an Essbase implementation. For more details on what this means, refer

Technical

Oracle Essbase 11.1.1.3 and BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – Displaying Member Properties – UDAs, Attributes and Alias Tables

Evaluate based MDX functions in BI EE currently do not support the display of quite a few member properties like Generation Number, Level Number, Alias Tables etc. These member properties can be very useful for reporting and sometimes these member properties drive the formatting of data, reporting layouts etc. Though

Technical

Oracle Essbase 11.1.1.3 – Integration with Relational Sources and Applications

In the past i have covered a wide range of integration possibilities of Oracle Essbase with relational sources. This is probably one area that will always evoke interest as from a reporting perspective it is not always possible to maintain the data in only one source(either be it Essbase

Technical

Oracle Buys (Bits Of) Hyperroll

The news hit the wires last night [http://twitter.com/eddieawad/status/4479863911] that Oracle were buying (certain assets of) Hyperroll [http://www.hyperroll.com], a technology company out of Israel with a head office in the USA. Hyperroll have been around for as long as I've been

Technical

Oracle Essbase 11.1.1.3 – Drill-through to BI EE from Smart View – Using Essbase Studio - HOLAP

One of the nice little advantages of using Oracle Essbase Studio is the fact that it manages the relational drill through much better than the Essbase Integration Services. With the advent of Essbase studio, all the metadata for relational drill through is pushed back to the Studio server. So, when

Technical

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – Enforcing and Non-Enforcing Outer Joins

One of the flexibilities of the BI Server is its ability to fine-tune certain sql queries being fired back to the database. One such example is its ability to enforce certain outer joins when required. For example, lets consider a simple example containing the Customer dimension and the Sales fact

Technical

OWB 11gR2 and BI EE - Creating a Business Model - Part 2

In the last blog entry here [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/09/10/owb-11gr2-and-bi-ee-deriving-the-business-model-part-1/] , i had covered the automatic derivation of BI EE business model from OWB 11gR2. Though it works out of the box, in most cases, users will like to have more control on the business model

Technical

OWB 11gR2 and BI EE – Deriving the Business Model – Part 1

One of the most anticipated features(atleast for all BI EE users) of the recently released OWB 11gR2 is its ability to create a BI EE repository directly from its table/view/dimensional objects. This feature to derive BI specific objects was one of the very popular ones when a

Technical

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – BI Server Query Parameters - Driving Tables and Parameterized Sub-Queries

Whenever BI Server is used for creating reports containing data from multiple databases, BI Server acts like a mini-database engine. It does a lot of operations itself like joins, sorts, group bys etc, everything in its own memory space. Since it acts like a database engine, it has to have

Technical

Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – OLTP Reporting – Conforming Dimensions and Multi-Grain Fact measures

In the last blog entry here [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/08/21/oracle-bi-ee-10-1-3-4-1-oltp-reporting-switching-tables-based-on-chosen-dimensions-use-case-1/] , i had shown a very simple transactional reporting use case wherein i made the BI Server to switch tables based on the measures chosen. Basically switching of tables would result in hitting a specific table