Blog

by Kurt Wolff

Someone asked a question on a “Siebel Analytics” email group a few days ago that I thought was worth discussing briefly here. The question posed was how to put a date prompt on a dashboard and return data for that date and the next 30 days. The solution could not involve presentation or report variables, since these were introduced only in a later version of Siebel Analytics that the person who posed the question did not have.

by Kurt Wolff

There are times when you might want to visually present data directly in tables or pivot tables rather than create a chart view. For example, you may have too many values to show in a chart. Or the number of values returned by the query might vary, making the size of the chart sometimes too small to accommodate them all, sometimes too large. Or you may want to visually scroll up and down a table to compare values and would like a visual representation right there in the table.

by Kurt Wolff

I thought it would be worth exploring the interrelated topics of repository groups, web groups, system session variables,  Delivers, the SA System subject area, and My Account. 

By Harisha Pattela

To install and configure BI Composer for Oracle BI EE, use the following steps as a guide:

Step 1

Extend a Web Logic Server domain & to install BI Composer runtime implementation shared libraries:

1. Stop the Web Logic Server.
2. Launch the Configuration Wizard.
3. Select Extend an existing Weblogic domain, and then click Next.
4. Select the domain folder (for example, <mw_home>/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain), and then click Next.

By Kurt Wolff

When I read the questions people ask about data modeling on OBIEE forums, one that seems to come up frequently is what to do when you have fact tables that do not join to all dimension tables.

By Kurt Wolff

“Writeback” – presenting an Answers interface so that users can update data in database tables or insert new rows – first appeared in version 7.8.4. To use OBIEE’s writeback capabilities, there are several set up steps. While each one is simple and fairly straightforward, it’s easy to forget all the steps and where each one is located. This document contains the instructions in case you find yourself forgetting them. Since many people like to demo using Excel as a data source, it focuses first on using Excel. Later, an example using an Oracle table is discussed.

By Kurt Wolff

It is often convenient to set a number of session variables to capture date values that you use repeatedly in your queries. For example, if you have weeks that end on Saturday, you might want to have the date of the most recent Saturday in a session variable, called perhaps PREVIOUSSATURDAY. You can then use that session variable as the default date value in your queries – for example, “Periods”.”Date” = VALUEOF(NQ_SESSION.PREVIOUSSATURDAY).

By Kurt Wolff

This post shows how you can use presentation variables to select a single value in a dashboard prompt and produce a result set that includes a range of values. For example, you could select a single year in a prompt and show data for that year and the preceding three years

By Kurt Wolff

The OBIEE Answers (10g) user interface says to use "fmap" when referring to resources on the presentation server.

By Kurt Wolff

There are many times when it is very beneficial to pass the value of session variables (or report variables) into the SQL used to define a Select table in the physical layer. This allows the select statement to focus on just the data you want, rather than creating a view with potentially millions of rows and then subsequently applying a filter to that result set.