Rittman Mead - Delivered Intelligence

I’ve been doing a lot of traveling recently, which as usual means that I’ve been doing a lot of reading. I normally take a novel with me when I’m on the road but based on some recommendations, I’ve been working through a batch of books on business analytics. First off was “Competing on Analytics”, the […]

In yesterday’s article I posted the first half of an email interview with Phil Bates, architect for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition based down in Bristol, UK. Phil’s focus is on the vision, direction, architecture and development strategy for Oracle Business Intelligence products, and in today’s posting we ask him about the integration of Oracle […]

One of the things you might not know about product development for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition is that a lot of it happens down the road from us, in Bristol in the UK. Oracle’s team in Bristol and the UK were originally responsible for Oracle Discoverer, and over the past year or so have […]

If they wanted all of the measures by a selection of application stages, or a selection of measures by the same set of application stages we could have used a crosstab and had application stage as one of the dimensions, day of month (say) as the other and we’d have been fine, but as the report used an arbitrary selection of measures and application stages, the only way around this was to “pivot” the fact table by the application stage and derive out the measures using a CASE statement, like this: This would then lead to this measure appearing in the logical fact table as a calculation, rather a normal logical column mapped to a physical column. … I’ve done a fair few OBIEE implementations now and this one reinforced by view that to be good with OBIEE, you need to have three main skills Knowledge of OBIEE, specifically how the physical to logical model translation works, how to use Logical Table Sources, how to derive measures, how to create joins in the Logical and Physical models, and in particular (and this is where experience on deployments, rather than demos comes in) knowledge of all the little quirks, like the non-aggregatibility of calculated columns issue I mentioned earlier on, how to resolve self-joins and multiple joins between tables through Aliases and so on.

Yesterday I mentioned that I was working this week on an OBIEE proof of concept, I said at the time that I’d make some notes on how the project went and the methodology I used to pull the system together. As I obviously can’t write about the actual client or system I built, I’ll use […]

I’ve just arrived in Birmingham to be ready for a week of OBIEE data modeling for one of our clients up here. They have built an application that now needs some reports added, they’ve gone for OBIEE and my job is to create the logical model, map it on to their OLTP database, add security […]

Whilst I remember it, Venkat has written up another excellent OBIEE article, this time on performing multi-user development against an OBIEE repository.
This uses the new “Projects” feature introduced in a recent release of OBIEE, and allows individual developers to “check out” logical fact tables and their corresponding dimensions, make some changes and check them back […]

A year or so ago I mentioned that I’d started work on a book for Oracle Press entitled “Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Developers Guide” with a projected release date of the first part of this year. Whilst the book is still in the pipeline, we’ve revised the plans a bit and I thought this would […]

In the final part of my series on migrating an OBIEE installation from direct application access to a data warehouse, I’m finally going to plug my new data warehouse into my OBIEE logical model. Previous to this, in the first posting I created a single logical model over three different application data sources, and in […]

In yesterdays posting, I took a look at some of the practicalities behind my recent article on OBIEE “next-generation” architectures. The idea behind this architecture is that you can use the connectivity features of OBIEE to initially report against your data in-place, and then behind the scenes take this data, load it into a data […]