Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

I’m off to do a presales visit to Ireland tomorrow, and the bit of technology
I’ll be demonstrating is the new Oracle
BI Suite Enterprise Edition. I had to put a demo together to show the
customer, and therefore I was able to spend a few hours this afternoon working
with Oracle
BI Answers and Dashboards. As with my other demos and articles, I used the Global
Electronics Sample Schema, and here’s how it looked at the end of the
afternoon:

The demo starts off with the user logging into the Web
interface, whereapon their default dashboard is displayed. In this case, it’s
got two tabs, one for Marketing Analysis, the other for a Sales Dashboard. When
they click on the other tab, the Sales Dashboard is shown:

I worked out a few good techniques and approaches when putting
the demo together, the first of which was around calculations. The Global Sample
Schema comes with two fact tables; one called “Units” that is
dimensioned by product, time, channel and customer, and another called
“Prices and Costs”, that is dimensioned by just product and time. Both
fact tables are automatically joined together when you bring them into the
Semantic Model, so it’s fairly straightforward to bring them into the same
query, like this:

So what if you want to derive some additional columns, say
“revenue” (units * unit price) and “profit” (unit price -
unit cost)? Well, just like Discoverer, you can define the calculation either in
the metadata using the Windows-based Administrator tool, or you can define it
within the report. If you define it in the metadata, it’s an Administrator job
but it’s then available to all users (if you want it to be), if you define it in
your report, then it’s local to that report only.

To define a calculation in your report, you first have to add a
column from the left-hand panel to the report, and in my case I added the Units
column again. Then, you click on the fx button above the
new column, and redefine the formula to suit your calculation, like this:

Then, when you view the results, the calculated column is now in
the resultset. Note also the image in the table header; the product ships with a
number of title icons that you can include in your reports.

Once you’ve put your dataset together, there are quite a few
options around “visualization”. In BI Answers, what you’d refer to as
a query in Discoverer is called a “request”, and each request can have
one or more “views” associated with it. The most usual view is the
table view, what you get when you first put your query together, and this is
usually accompanied by the “Title” view, which is where you add your
logos and so on, like this:

See the “Title” value in the drop-down list under the
Answers tabs - that’s where you switch between views. Now, if you want to add a
visualization to the table, or any other type of view (a pivot-table, for
example), you click on the view drop-down list, and select the view you wish to
add.

In my case, I’m going to add a Gauge view, to see how it
compares with Discoverer’s Gauge portlet

The differences here are that you can change the size of the
gauges, but other than that the standard gauge is suprisingly similar to the
Discoverer Portlet one. One nice touch though is that you can change the type of
gauge to “bulb”, which gives you an out-of-the-box “traffic
light” solution:

This’d be useful if you want to put a row of indicators, say, at
the top of your dashboard page to show whether certain products were selling
according to plan, or whether calls are being answered in time.

Once you’ve added your visualizations, it’s back then to the
View drop-down, and this time you need to select “Compound Layout”,
remove the table view, and add in the Gauge view so that it’s all that’s
displayed when the request is deployed to the dashboard:

Then it’s just a simple case of deploying the request to the
dashboard, along with all the others.

As a quick plug, if anyone reading this article is a Discoverer
customer looking to migrate to BI Suite Enterprise Edition, we’re putting
together a migration program in conjunction with Oracle to help you make the
move. If you’re based in the UK, Europe or the USA, myself and my team are
working on a migration methodology to move Discoverer business areas, reports
and queries to BI Suite Enterprise Edition, and we’re looking for customers who
are willing to take part in a pilot program to start taking advantage of BI
Suite Enterprise Edition’s new features. If you’re interested, drop
me a line and we can have a chat about it.

That’s it for now. Apart from putting this demo together, I’ve
just finished off my article for OTN on BI Suite Enterprise Edition, which has
now gone for review and should be back to me with edits in the next month or so.
Apart from that, the other article I recently put together again for OTN, on
Data Profiling with Oracle Warehouse Builder 10gR2, should be up on their site
within the next few days, so check back there if you’re interested in how this
new Warehouse Builder feature works.

Posted in Oracle BI Suite EE |