by Kurt Wolff
One of the questions that comes up over and over again is how to show all periods in a query when facts don’t exist for all periods or how to show all products when facts don’t exist for all products.
by Kurt Wolff
[Note: the following discussion is based on OBIEE version 10.1.3.4.0 and Oracle XE version 10G, both running on Windows. The behavior of other versions of OBIEE could be different.]
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Tags: Kurt Wolff, Oracle BI, Blog
by Kurt Wolff
Here’s a not uncommon scenario. You are designing a dashboard page with a report such as sales by customer. To show sales by customer, you design a report containing the CustomerName column so that facts are grouped by customer. You provide a multi-select prompt to allow the user to select which customer data to view. But you also want to provide the ability to view the data for all customers as a total, without grouping by customer.
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Tags: Kurt Wolff, Oracle BI, Blog
by Kurt Wolff
Here is a technique for enabling the user to set join columns with a dashboard prompt.
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by Kurt Wolff
The Ago() “time series function” can be used to show data for a previous time period, as long as the previous time period corresponds to a level that has been defined in the period hierarchy. A typical period hierarchy containing day, month, quarter, and year levels would allow you to use the Ago function to construct measures showing data for day ago, month ago, quarter ago, year ago (or N days ago, N months ago, etc.).
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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.
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Tags: Kurt Wolff, Oracle BI, Blog
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.
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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.
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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).
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Tags: Kurt Wolff, Oracle BI, Blog
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
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Tags: Kurt Wolff, Oracle BI, Blog
