If you want to export to UDML than you can use the commands: nqudmlexec.exe and  nqudmlgen.exe.
If you want to export to XUDML than you can use the commands: biserverxmlgen.exe and  
These commands can be found in this location: C:\oracle\middleware\Oracle_BI1\bifoundation\server\bin

Lets start with an example to export an RPD to XUDML.

1. Make a copy of your original RPD and put in a temporary folder , eg c:\testconnpool.
2. Generate the XUDML by executing the command biserverxmlgen
3. Go to the folder C:\oracle\middleware\Oracle_BI1\bifoundation\server\bin and type this command

biserverxmlgen -R C:\testconnpool\base.rpd -P Admin123 -O c:\testconnpool\test.xml -8

The parameters for the biserverxmlgen command are as follows:

- P repository_password
- R repository_pathname
- O output_script
-8 UTF-8


4. When this step is successful the XUDML is generated. Open the XUDML file named “test.xml” and check the content of the file.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

As this post is about changing the connection pool we are going to look in the XUDML file and look for the tag <Connection Pool>

<ConnectionPool name="Master" parentName="&quot;Master&quot;" parentId="3023:5" parentUid="8" id="3029:7" uid="10" user="obiee" password="6C6F0BE01FC4111F3AC2236A364D912E9B70195D55A2B76F203F3DDAF9C76F072606B70FAE3A2C3FC913
843F794309A82CF208A690AD0045D3DCE7CCEEA3B72F 137949B8C699489A5D548D7D5F4828ADB4071CCB22E7FEECBCE71592C1AC13E3" timeout="300" maxConnDiff="10" maxConn="10" dataSource="master" type="Default" reqQualifedTableName="false" isSharedLogin="true" isConcurrentQueriesInConnection="false" isCloseAfterEveryRequest="false" outputType="xml" bulkInsertBufferSize="131072" tempTablePrefix="TT" transactionBoundary="1000" xmlaUseSession="false" isSiebelJDBSecured="false"><Description></Description></ConnectionPool>

So we were able to export the RPD to XUDML and to find the connection pool in this file. Now we want to change the password of this connection pool but this password is encrypted. When you try to change the encrypted password to  the new password  this will not work. Some extra steps are needed to change the password of the connection pool.

5. Go back to the  original copy of the RPD, open it and select Manage > Variables from the application menu.

6. Now we are going to create two static repository variables:

puser ‘obiee’
ppass ‘mastertest’

7. Next, go the connection pool in the rpd and replace the user and the password with the static variables. Replace the user name with valueof(puser) and replace the password with valueof(ppass) and save the RPD.

8. Now rerun the XUDML command
biserverxmlgen -R C:\testconnpool\base.rpd -P Admin123 -O c:\testconnpool\test2.xml -8

9. Open the XUDML file “test2.xml” and look for the variable tag ppass
<Variable name="puser" id="3031:65" uid="126">
<Description></Description>
<Expr><![CDATA['obiee']]></Expr>
</Variable>
<Variable name="ppass" id="3031:66" uid="128">
<Description></Description>
<Expr><![CDATA['mastertest']]></Expr>
</Variable>

Change the content of this variable with the desired new password; in this case you need to replace ‘mastertest’ by the new password and save the changes.

Now generate the new RPD by using the command biserverxmlexec. Go to the folder C:\oracle\middleware\Oracle_BI1\bifoundation\server\bin and execute this command:

biserverxmlexec -I c:\testconnpool\test2.xml -O base2.rpd

The tool will prompt for the repository password.

The parameters for the biserverxmlexec command are as follows:

-P      : Password for repository
-I      : Input script file name
-B      : Base repository name
-O      : Output repository name

A new RPD is generated and the password for the connection pool has been changed.

I must give a huge thanks to Bambi Price and her team from Park Lane Technologies here in Melbourne for the assistance provided to RMO and bringing events such as Insync to my attention, and also allowing me to shelter in their booth during the conference.

Coinciding with this event was the announcement of the ODTUG “Seriously Practical’ conference to be held this year in Sydney Australia on the 3rd and 4th of November 2011. After a long hiatus from these shores, Mark Rittman will be attending, along with recently named Oracle ACE Stewart Bryson, Managing Director of Rittman Mead America plus a list of expert speakers in BI/EPM which can be found here.

This is a great chance to see both Mark and Stewart, acclaimed presenters at various events throughout the world presenting what they do best. Mark will be posting more information of this event soon, so stay tuned for further details.

If you have been pleased with the services offered by Rittman Mead, we would greatly appreciate your vote. You can vote here. Voting opened on the 12th August and will close at midday 31st August 2011. This year to ensure the voting is fair any end-user with a profile on the UKOUG website either as a guest or a member is eligible to vote. You can create a profile here.

Voting is for customers and end-users only. For more information about the awards go to this link.

To illustrate what I’m talking about, take a simple analysis created against the Sample.Basic Essbase database, which I’ve imported into an OBIEE 11.1.1.5. repository using the default settings, and then created physical cube columns for the UDAs within the Market dimension, and the Default alias table within the Product dimension.

Notice how, at this stage, the measure hierarchy has been brought in as-is, with the full hierarchy preserved and a single measure, in a physical cube column called Basic – measure. To get access to a particular measure (for example, Profit), you’ll need to include this measure in an analysis criteria and filter on the Gen2, Measures, Gen3, Measures or Gen4, Measures logical column; or alternatively, access the measure dimension via a hierarchical column, and drill-down or use selection steps until you get to the one you want.

So let’s start then by creating an analysis where I have the Marketing and Payroll measures along the columns, and the East and West regions on the rows, and the numbers are for the Budget scenario. In MDX terms, using the essmsh command-line tool this would look something like:

MAXL> select {Measures.Marketing, Measures.Payroll} ON COLUMNS,
2>           {Market.East, Market.West, Market.South} ON ROWS
3> from Sample.Basic
4> where {Scenario.Budget};

Axis-1              (Marketing)         (Payroll)
+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------
(East)                            11210                7100
(West)                            16800               11660
(South)                            6120                5090

In OBIEE 11g, an equivalent analysis would look like this, using a pivot table view:

The criteria to create such an analysis would look like this:

Now this criteria is relatively simple, as we’ve selected measures that are within the same generation (Marketing and Payroll, both within the third generation in the Measure hierarchy). In reality, your measures are likely to come from different measure hierarchy generations, which is the reason you’ll often flatten the measures in the OBIEE physical model, but I’ll come on to the why and wherefores of that in a moment. For now though, the criteria is fairly simple and results in the following MDX sent to the Essbase server.

With
set [_Market2]  as '{Distinct({[Market].[East], [Market].[South], [Market].[West]})}'
set [_Measures4]  as '{Distinct({[Measures].[Marketing], [Measures].[Payroll]})}'
select
{ [Attribute Calculations]
} on columns,
NON EMPTY {crossjoin({[_Market2]},{[_Measures4]})} properties GEN_NUMBER, [Measures].[MEMBER_UNIQUE_NAME], [Measures].[Memnor], [Market].[MEMBER_UNIQUE_NAME], [Market].[Memnor] on rows
from [Sample.Basic]
where ([Scenario].[Budget])

OK, not so bad. It’s a variation on what we coded by hand (using WITH blocks to define the set of rows and columns upfront, and a crossjoin to return the product of the two dimension member sets, but it’s recognizable as being more or less equivalent to our hand-coded MDX.

So what if we try a simple calculation? Let’s add the Marketing and Payroll measures together to create a new measure called Direct Costs. In MDX, I’d write this as:

MAXL> with member Measures.[Direct Costs] as
2>            'Measures.Marketing + Measures.Payroll'
3> select {Measures.Marketing, Measures.Payroll, Measures.[Direct Costs]} ON COLUMNS,
4>           {Market.East, Market.West, Market.South} ON ROWS
5> from Sample.Basic
6> where {Scenario.Budget};

Axis-1              (Marketing)         (Payroll)           (Direct Costs)
+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------
(East)                            11210                7100               18310
(West)                            16800               11660               28460
(South)                            6120                5090               11210

So let’s try and create this now using OBIEE. Going back to the analysis criteria, I look for a way to add the two measures together.

OK, so this is interesting. There’s no Marketing or Payroll measure to select and use as part of an expression, as the measure name is actually a dimension member and there’s only one measure as-such. This is the drawback with bringing your measure dimension into OBIEE – you don’t then have individual measures you can select from to include in an analysis, create or include in calculations, and so on.

Now one way around this is to use the new “selection steps” feature in OBIEE 11g to calculate this value post-aggregation, after the initial filtering has happened and using the resulting result set. I therefore create a new selection step, like this:

and Bob is indeed your uncle.

So apart from figuring out the selection step move, this was actually quite straightforward. So how does the MDX look?

With
set [_Market2]  as '{Distinct({[Market].[East], [Market].[South], [Market].[West]})}'
set [_Measures4]  as '{Distinct({[Measures].[Marketing], [Measures].[Payroll]})}'
set [_Measures4FILTER1]  as '{Distinct({[Measures].[Payroll]})}'
set [_Measures4FILTER2]  as '{Distinct({[Measures].[Marketing]})}'
member [Attribute Calculations].[_MSCMFILTER1] as 'AGGREGATE(Intersect([_Measures4FILTER1], {[Measures].CurrentMember}))', SOLVE_ORDER = 102
member [Attribute Calculations].[_MSCMFILTER2] as 'AGGREGATE(Intersect([_Measures4FILTER2], {[Measures].CurrentMember}))', SOLVE_ORDER = 102
select
{ [Attribute Calculations],
[Attribute Calculations].[_MSCMFILTER1],
[Attribute Calculations].[_MSCMFILTER2]
} on columns,
NON EMPTY {crossjoin({[_Market2]},{[_Measures4]})} properties GEN_NUMBER, [Measures].[MEMBER_UNIQUE_NAME], [Measures].[Memnor], [Market].[MEMBER_UNIQUE_NAME], [Market].[Memnor] on rows
from [Sample.Basic]
where ([Scenario].[Budget])

OK, so what’s going on here is the situation Venkat described back in some earlier blog posts, where selection steps involves the BI Server generating MDX that calculates lots of additional values which it then combines back together to give you your result set. Running this MDX statement through the MAXL command shell gives us this output:

Axis-1              Axis-1.properties   (Attribute Calculat (_MSCMFILTER1)      (_MSCMFILTER2)
+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------
(East, Marketing)   (GEN_NUMBER = 2, ty               11210            #Missing               11210
(East, Payroll)     (GEN_NUMBER = 2, ty                7100                7100            #Missing
(South, Marketing)  (GEN_NUMBER = 2, ty                6120            #Missing                6120
(South, Payroll)    (GEN_NUMBER = 2, ty                5090                5090            #Missing
(West, Marketing)   (GEN_NUMBER = 2, ty               16800            #Missing               16800
(West, Payroll)     (GEN_NUMBER = 2, ty               11660               11660            #Missing

The BI Server takes this result set, plus some additional member information it gets via another MDX query, and adds the results together as per the selection step calculation to give you your direct costs calculation. So whilst it’s very easy for the end-user to create their calculation (and in the case of using selection steps, just as easy to select measures from different measure hierarchy generations), but it’s not actually Essbase that’s doing the calculation, its the BI Server (and in fact Essbase is doing a lot of extra work to return all these subtotals, at least compared to my hand-written MDX).

An alternative to using selection steps though, would be to flatten the measure hierarchy into a flat list of measures, the same way that OBIEE 10g did by default when importing Essbase outlines. How does this affect the MDX that’s generated for a calculation like this?

I start then by duplicating the Essbase database in the OBIEE repository physical layer, and then select the option to flatten the measure hierarchy, giving me a physical model looking like this:

Now creating my calculation in the analysis criteria is really easy, as I’ve got individual measures for the Marketing and Payroll members, which I can just add together to create a new measure in the criteria.

So how do the numbers look? One advantage of working with a flattened list of measures, is that you can use a regular table view to display the results, rather than having to use a pivot table view as you do with a measure hierarchy. Taking a first look, the figures look correct:

What about the MDX? Well, it’s actually a lot closer to the MDX I wrote by hand; instead of adding the two measures together, it creates a set of the two (giving the same result, in this instance), but other than that, it looks pretty close to the MDX I wrote.

With
set [_Market2]  as '{Distinct({[Market].[East], [Market].[South], [Market].[West]})}'
select
{ [Measures].[Payroll],
[Measures].[Marketing]
} on columns,
NON EMPTY {{[_Market2]}} properties GEN_NUMBER, [Market].[MEMBER_UNIQUE_NAME], [Market].[Memnor] on rows
from [Sample.Basic]
where ([Scenario].[Budget])

Just as a quick check, I create another analysis that randomly adds up, divides and otherwise applies simple operators to some measures.

Now if I were to write an MDX statement to retrieve numbers like this, I’d probably write something along the lines of:

MAXL> with member Measures.[Sales Divided by Marketing]
2> as 'Measures.Sales / Measures.Marketing'
3> member Measures.[Sales Plus Total Expenses]
4> as 'Measures.Sales + Measures.[Total Expenses]'
5> member Measures.[Sales times Margin]
6> as 'Measures.Sales * Measures.Margin'
7> select {Measures.Sales, Measures.Marketing, Measures.[Sales Divided by Marketing], Measures.[Sales Plus Total Expenses], Measures.[Sales times Margin]} ON COLUMNS,
8> {Market.children} ON ROWS
9> from [Sample.Basic]
10> ;

Axis-1              (Sales)             (Marketing)         (Sales Divided by M (Sales Plus Total E (Sales times Margin
+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------
(East)                            87398               14721    5.93696080429319              112708          4323666458
(West)                           132931               23529    5.64966636916146              173096          9308626206
(South)                           50846                8281    6.14007970051926               66504          1469246016
(Central)                        129680               19706     6.5807368314219              164544          9482979680

Looking at the MDX generated by the BI Server though, using flattened measures, gives us a bit of a surprise:

With
set [_Market2]  as '[Market].Generations(2).members'
select
{ [Measures].[Marketing],
[Measures].[Sales],
[Measures].[Total Expenses],
[Measures].[Margin]
} on columns,
NON EMPTY {{[_Market2]}} properties GEN_NUMBER, [Market].[MEMBER_UNIQUE_NAME], [Market].[Memnor] on rows
from [Sample.Basic]

All the BI Server does, then, is just request the basic values for measures from Essbase. The BI Server then performs the calculations, and you’ll find this happens all over the place. Where you would have assumed that the BI Server would ship-down calculations to the Essbase server, instead it just requests the basic data and performs the calculation in-memory, in the BI Server.

But if you particularly want to make use of an Essbase MDX function, there is actually a way you can do this, and it’s through the EVALUATE, EVALUATE_AGGR and EVALUATE_PREDICATE functions within OBIEE. These functions provide a way to pass through a request to the underlying datasource for an analysis to use a particular function, and you can use this approach to make use of Oracle database functions that either don’t have an equivalent within OBIEE, or perhaps you’ve written yourself. But you can also use this approach for working with Essbase sources, and it even allows you to do things that would be tricky to do in the ROLAP-world of OBIEE but are easy to do within a multi-dimensional database such as Essbase.

Take, for example, a situation were we want to list out, in an analysis, a list of markets together with sales amount AND the average sale amount for the states within each of the regions. In this case, getting the average sale amount for each region’s constituent states would actually be quite tricky with a regular relational source, as the dimension members your calculating the average for are at a different level of granularity to the one used in the query, but for Essbase this is easy. Let’s take a look at how we’d write this in MDX first.

MAXL> with
2>   set regions  as 'Market.children'
3>   member Measures.Children_AVG as 'AVG(Market.currentmember.children,Measures.Sales)'
4> select
5>   { Measures.Sales,
6>     Measures.Children_AVG
7>   } on columns,
8>   NON EMPTY {regions} on rows
9> from [Sample.Basic];

Axis-1              (Sales)             (Children_AVG)
+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------
(East)                            87398             17479.6
(West)                           132931             26586.2
(South)                           50846             12711.5
(Central)                        129680    21613.3333333333

Now moving over to OBIEE, what we want to use now is an EVALUATE_AGGR function, to leverage the AVG MDX function. This function takes two arguments:

AVG(set, numeric_value)

In other words, you pass it a set of members (or “tuples” in Essbase-speak), and a number to perform the average over. So now, if we want to use this in OBIEE to return an aggregated value, we need to substitute a dimension member reference and a measure reference which in turn will be passed down, along with the call to the AVG MDX function, to Essbase.

To do this I create a new logical column in the business model holding my Essbase data (the one with flattened measures), and edit the logical table source expression list to reference this function.

I also set the default aggregation type for this new column to AGGR_EXTERNAL, and then copy it across to the presentation layer subject area.

Now I can create an analysis that lists out the regions, their total sales, and then the average sale value for the states below each region, something that it’d actually be quite tricky to do with a relational source.

Taking a look at the MDX generated by the BI Server, it looks along the same lines as the one we wrote by hand:

With
set [_Market2]  as '[Market].Generations(2).members'
member [Measures].[_MSCM1] as 'AVG(Market.currentmember.children,[Measures].[Sales])', SOLVE_ORDER = 101
select
{ [Measures].[Sales],
[Measures].[_MSCM1]
} on columns,
NON EMPTY {{[_Market2]}} properties GEN_NUMBER, [Market].[MEMBER_UNIQUE_NAME], [Market].[Memnor] on rows
from [Sample.Basic]

Now what we’ve seen there is an example of an MDX function that returns an aggregated value, hence our use of EVALUATE_AGGR. But we can also return values that can be used as attributes for a dimension member, for example the count of immediate “children” under a dimension member. In this example, if we were to write a query in MDX that returned total sales for a region and also the number of states underneath it, the query would look like this:

MAXL> WITH
2> member Measures.Num_Children AS
3>   'count(Market.currentmember.children)'
4> select {measures.sales, measures.num_children} on columns,
5> {market.children} on rows
6> from Sample.Basic;

Axis-1              (Sales)             (Num_Children)
+-------------------+-------------------+-------------------
(East)                            87398                   5
(West)                           132931                   5
(South)                           50846                   4
(Central)                        129680                   6

To make use of this dimension member count in OBIEE, we’d need to use the EVALUATE function, and pass to it a reference to the currently selected dimension members’ children, and the name of the dimension that we’ll be calculating this for.

Taking a look at the MDX generated by the BI Server, it’s as you’d expect.

With
set [_Market2]  as '[Market].Generations(2).members'
member [Measures].[_MSCM1] as 'count([Market].Generations(1).dimension.currentmember.children)'
select
{ [Measures].[Sales],
[Measures].[_MSCM1]
} on columns,
NON EMPTY {{[_Market2]}} properties GEN_NUMBER, [Market].[MEMBER_UNIQUE_NAME], [Market].[Memnor] on rows
from [Sample.Basic]

So it’s a bit of a mixed picture with calculations with an Essbase source. On the one hand, OBIEE doesn’t really make much use at all of MDX functions, instead retrieving just the basic measure values from the Essbase database and performing the calculations itself, within the BI Server. In many cases this is fine, but it can trip you up if you’re expecting to offload processing to the Essbase server but instead, you find the BI Server is actually doing most of the work. In some cases there’s good reasons for the approach Oracle have taken – not all MDX functions work across all storage types, for example – but it’s worth being aware of this before you get too deep into working with Essbase.

The flip side of this though is being able to access MDX functions directly via the EVALUATE_AGGR and EVALUATE functions. These functions actually give you the ability to perform calculations, across levels and dimensions, that you would even be able to do with regular sources and OBIEE functions, and on most projects using Essbase sources you’re going to be using these functions alot, both to compensate for lack of push-down from the BI Server, but mostly to take advantage of the MDX functions and cross-hierarchy and level calculations that you can perform from Essbase.

There is one exception to all this though, and it’s an interesting one. The one type of OBIEE function that does get pushed down correctly to Essbase, is time-series functions. The AGO, TODATE and (new in 11g) PERIODROLLING do indeed get translated down to their equivalent MDX functions, which means that you can use the time-series calculations and wizard available in OBIEE to create all your time-based derived measures.

For example, consider a situation where you wish to calculate the value of sales for the previous quarter. In OBIEE, you’d create a time-series calculation looking like this:

Then your analysis would look like this:

Taking a look at the MDX generated by the BI Server, it does indeed use the PARALLELPERIOD MDX function.

With
set [_Year2]  as '[Year].Generations(2).members'
member [Measures].[_MSCM1] as '(ParallelPeriod([Year].[Quarter], 1,[Year].currentmember), [Measures].[Sales])'
select
{ [Measures].[Sales],
[Measures].[_MSCM1]
} on columns,
NON EMPTY {{[_Year2]}} properties GEN_NUMBER, [Year].[MEMBER_UNIQUE_NAME], [Year].[Memnor] on rows
from [Sample.Basic]

So, it’s been a long post, but what observations and rules-of-thumb can we draw therefore for Essbase sources and calculations?

• Measure hierarchies are great for end-users, particularly if they come from a traditional Essbase background. Coupled with selection steps, it’s easy to select measures from a hierarchy and perform calculations all from the Answers UI
• But measure hierarchies can often generate quite complex and costly MDX queries, and it’s often easier, as a developer, to work with flattened lists of measures. You can create these in a separate physical database model, or combine a measure hierarchy with a flattened list of measures in the same business model
• OBIEE out-of-the-box actually makes very little use of MDX functions in the Essbase database, instead choosing in most cases to just request measure values and then performing any calculations itself
• The exception to this is time-series queries, which do get pushed-down to their equivalent MDX function
• In some cases, you can compensate for this lack of push-down through the EVALUATE and EVALUATE_AGGR functions, but they don’t cover all situations and also limit you in terms of drill-down etc. EVALUATE and EVALUATE_AGGR also provide you with some extra functionality though, as they let you harness the ability of Essbase to calculate numbers across different hierarchy levels and dimensions.

That’s it for Essbase for a while now; keep an eye on the blog for a bit more on OBIEE 11g and Oracle OLAP, plus possibly some content on OBIEE 11g and Microsoft Analysis Services, to see how well support for Microsoft’s OLAP server compares to Essbase.

As we’ve recently had 11.1.1.5 releases of OBIEE and ODI, I’ve updated a lot of the content over the past few weeks to bring it bang-up-to-date. Some areas that have been added and updated since the agenda was first published include:

• Updated and extended OBIEE/Essbase content, including actions for writeback and calc scripts, and a look into OBIEE’s MDX generation
• Additional content around 11.1.1.3 and 11.1.1.5 ODI mapping capabilities, including load plans, temporary interfaces and OBIEE lineage
• A new section on accessing Oracle OLAP from OBIEE 11.1.1.5
• New information on the Simple Install architecture for OBIEE 11.1.1.5, and the 11.1.1.3 > 11.1.1.5 upgrade process
• BI Composer, and an updated Scorecard and KPI section based on new 11.1.1.5 features
• Direct access in BI Publisher to XLS data sources from the data modeller
• An update in the Security section based on the two Oracle Security presentations at the BI Forum
• Integrating Google Maps using Oracle Mapviewer

As is usually the case with Oracle University, they take a call on whether or not to run each event two weeks beforehand, so if you’re thinking of attending make sure you book soon, as if you leave it too late it may well end up cancelled. Links for the two events are here:

• Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Masterclass with Mark Rittman, Oracle University, Dublin, Ireland, July 4-5th 2011
• Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Masterclass with Mark Rittman, Oracle University, London, July 7-8th 2011

Hopefully I’ll see some of you there!

If you’re a user of Oracle’s BI EE or BI SE (Discoverer) tools, or a user of the Hyperion toolset (Essbase, Planning etc), this is your chance to have your views heard, share your experiences and contribute to wider knowledge about BI tool deployment. We’ve been following the BI Survey’s results for many years and they are invaluable in working out where Oracle are getting it right, and getting it wrong, with their BI tool strategy, and if you fill in the short survey you’ll get the high-level results free-of-charge.

The link to the survey is here, and if you want some background to the BI Survey, take a look at our posting from this April.

The first challenge in getting up and running with BI Composer is that you’ve effectively got to install it yourself, after you do the main OBIEE 11.1.1.5 install. I won’t go into the full details here (all the steps are detailed in the docs), but you’ve basically got to run the WebLogic Configuration Utility to add some shared libraries to the OBIEE WebLogic Server Domain, then set up a JDBC connection through to the MDS schema, deploy the BI Composer application and then configure it to use that JDBC connection. Presumably it’ll be installed as part of the main install in future versions, and what we’re seeing here is a bit of an early preview.

Once BI Composer is up and running, you access it through switching your account to Accessibility mode, by selecting your account (e.g. Weblogic) > My Account from the common toolbar. This displays the My Account dialog and you need to select Yes for Accessibility Mode.

Now when you go back into the main dashboard or homepage, when you select New > Analysis, select Create > Analysis or open an existing analysis for editing, you’re taken into the BI Composer screen instead of regular Answers.

To create a new analysis using BI Composer, I therefore select New > Analysis, and select a subject area for the analysis. This then brings up the first BI Composer screen, for selecting columns for the analysis.

So the idea here is that BI Composer will take you through seven steps to create the analysis, guiding new users through the process of selecting columns, selecting views, sorting and filtering data, adding conditional formatting and then saving the analysis to the catalog. It’s aimed at new users (or disabled ones, going on the requirement for the accessibility settings in this release), and it’s a similar process Oracle have taken to the main OBIEE 11g interface, where there’s links to create new content, open content and so on right on the dashboard.

To add columns to the analysis, you drill-into the Subject Area listing on the left, tick the columns and hierarchies that you want and then press the Add link, which adds the selection to the right-hand column listing.

At the top of the page is a listing of the steps in the wizard. The next step on from selecting the columns is Select Views, and you progress to this by pressing the Next button on the far right-hand side of the screen.

On the Select Views page, you can type in the analysis title, and preview the compound layout as you create it. Note the buttons under the Title area for creating the Table, Graph, and setting the layout.

Pressing the None Menu button next to Table brings up a menu where you can select the type of numeric display you’d like to have in the analysis. I select Pivot (recommended) which is the recommended option when you include a hierarchical column in your selection.

Selecting Pivot (recommended) then, if you’ve got Preview enabled, displays the basic pivot table on the main wizard screen.

One thing I noticed is that some of the menu options (Summary Table Pivot for example) didn’t work, and crashed the application. I think this is very much an “alpha” release of the product and you should expect bugs and functions to not work properly.

I then press the None Menu button next to Graph, and you’re then presented with a list of graph types (a subset of what’s available in the full Answers product).



I select the Bar (recommended) menu item, which actually when I go back to the preview, shows the results still as a table.

I then move on to the next wizard step, Edit Table. This lets me move columns around from rows to columns, into the prompt or the sections area, and exclude columns. I move the columns around within the pivot table, like this:

I then do the same for the graph. Even after fine-tuning the column selection though, it still shows the graph as a table.

The next page lets you set the sort order, and define filtering, for the analysis. The filter dialog is very basic; you have to type in the filter values (rather than selecting them from a list of values, as with Answers); there’s no selection steps, no access to saved filters, no help with variables and so on. Also the interface is a bit “clunky”, with scrollbars not working properly and text boxes too small.

Next is a step to define conditional formatting, which works quite well except for the colours being listed in hex, rather than by colour.

Finally you get to save the analysis in the web catalog.

So once you’ve saved the analysis, how does it look? Well you can view the analysis directly in BI Composer, but the graph doesn’t show again, but if you come out of accessibility mode and then view the analysis using regular Answers, it looks as you’d expect, because all BI Composer is is a simplified interface for creating analyses, using a wizard.

So, what’s the conclusion then? Well, it’s pretty basic and buggy in this release, and the interface is very unpolished compared to Answers – to be honest, it looks like something you’d quickly put together as a POC for a client who asked for a simpler environment to create reports, and in fact we’ve done something very similar on projects in the past. I’m not sure what the direction is for the product – presumably, the accessibility settings hack is the only way to provide access to it in this release, and in future it’ll be pre-installed and available through the regular homepage, or perhaps it’s just a skunk-works project within the development team to try out some UI ideas? It’s an interesting concept though, and if anyone else gives it a try, leave a comment on this posting.

Last week several of us from Rittman Mead were in Orlando, Florida for Collaborate’11, the annual joint-conference by IOUG, Quest and OAUG. My two sessions were on KPIs and Scorecards using OBIEE11g, and OBIEE11g Architecture and Internals, and I also co-chaired (with Ian Abramson) the BIWA BI Bootcamp, where we ran two days of “soup-to-nuts” BI content for anyone looking to get skilled up on the OBIEE 11g platform.

Stewart Bryson, our US Managing Director, ran what is turning out to be a very popular presentation on real-time data warehousing using Oracle Database and OBIEE, whilst Borkur gave an overview of the Oracle GoldenGate change data capture and replication platform. Finally, Peter Scott gave a new presentation on Adding Externally Sourced data to a Business Intelligence Solution, focusing on the many ways in which external data can be added to an OBIEE-type system. All of the presentations can now be downloaded from our Articles page, where you’ll also find links to the various magazine and online articles we’ve had published.

From a BI content perspective, I was impressed with what was available at Collaborate, and the behind-the-scenes organization from IOUG and BIWA. I thought the BI Bootcamp concept went down well, and it was good to have some coherency around the content and thought given to attendees who might be new to the platform and want a basic overview of the complete range of functionality. For myself, the highlight of the event was a development update from Balaji Yelamanchili, Senior Vice President at Oracle in charge of all OBIEE development, where we were taken through some of the development goals Oracle are working to for their BI Platform. Some of these highlights included:

• The planned move to a more granular repository, with better support for concurrent development and versioning
• The move of this repository into the relational MDS schema that gets installed with BIPLATFORM by the 11g RCU
• In time, the adoption of the Fusion Development IDE for repository development (as used by JDeveloper and ODI 11g)
• A broad adoption of mobile as a strategic BI delivery channel, initially focusing on IOS (the iPad) and Android (Honeycomb)
• ETL automation, driven by the BI Server and logical-to-physical mappings in the repository
• Improved “speed-of-thought” analysis, driven by in-memory technologies, and with the ability to drive much denser visual analysis

There was a lot more, and it sounds like Open World this year will be a pretty landmark event for Oracle’s BI platform. Keep an eye on this blog for more details as they emerge, and if you’ve not signed up already, Oracle will be giving keynotes on OBIEE futures at our two BI Forum events in Brighton and Atlanta next month. For now though, it’s goodbye to Orlando and over to Stewart, who’s currently giving a session on Agile Development with OBIEE and Exadata at the UKOUG Exadata Special Event, in London.

The format of these two events is lectures and discussions, with the agenda for both events as follows:

Day 1:

• Oracle BI EE 11g overview and architecture
• Oracle BI Server New Features & Data Modeling Best Practices
• Building Reports, Dashboards, Maps & Scorecards using Oracle BI EE 11g
• ETL Integration with OWB11g R2 and ODI 11g

Day 2:

• Enhancements in Oracle BI Publisher 11g
• New Features in Oracle Essbase, and integration with OBIEE 11g
• Oracle ADF Integration with BI EE 11g and Essbase 11.1.2
• Actionable Intelligence and the Oracle BI EE 11g Action Framework

As with all OU events, a decision is taken around two weeks before the event date as to whether to run it, so if you’re thinking of attending, make sure you register at least four weeks before the event to guarantee it runs. I’ll also be debuting some new material at the event around ADF and Action Framework so if you’re interested in the integration capabilities of OBIEE 11g, make sure you come along.

You can book for the event direct through Oracle University, using the following links:

• Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Masterclass with Mark Rittman, Oracle University, Dublin, Ireland, July 4-5th 2011
• Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Masterclass with Mark Rittman, Oracle University, London, July 7-8th 2011