Announcing: Rittman Mead Training Days 2009 I'm very pleased to announce details of our second-ever Training Days [http://www.rittmanmead.com/trainingdays2009] event, to be held at the Bloomsbury Hotel [http://www.doylecollection.com/locations/london_city_hotels/the_bloomsbury_hotel.aspx] in London on October 27th - 29th 2009. This year I'
Technical Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – OLTP Reporting – Conforming Dimensions and Multi-Grain Fact measures In the last blog entry here [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/08/21/oracle-bi-ee-10-1-3-4-1-oltp-reporting-switching-tables-based-on-chosen-dimensions-use-case-1/] , i had shown a very simple transactional reporting use case wherein i made the BI Server to switch tables based on the measures chosen. Basically switching of tables would result in hitting a specific table
Technical Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – OLTP Reporting – Switching Tables based on chosen dimensions – Use Case 1 Though BI EE is well known for reporting on Stars, Facts and Dimensions, one of the lesser known or lesser advertised features is its extensive transactional or OLTP modeling capabilities. Steve Devine (our guest author last week) documents his experience well here [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/08/17/
Technical Oracle EPM 11.1.1.3 – Hyperion Shared Services integration with external Applications – Java API – Part 1 - Introduction One of the major enhancements that came in the Hyperion EPM 11 release is the availability of Java APIs to access shared services from external applications. In the prior releases, SDK’s were available but those have been enhanced completely now in this release to accommodate new features. Also with
Using OBIEE for Reporting Directly Against Operational Systems [This is a guest blog from Steve Devine from Hitachi Consulting, who we've known for a while and who attended our BI Forum in Brighton last May. Steve, Adrian, Venkat and I were discussing the issue of reporting against non-star schema data models and in particular the issues
Keynotes in Denmark and The Netherlands Apart from our Training Days [http://www.rittmanmead.com/trainingdays2009] event in October, I'll also be delivering keynotes at two events later in the year in Copenhagen and Leiden, The Netherlands. The Danish IT Society Business Intelligence Conference [http://www.dansk-it.dk/arrangementer/1595.aspx] in Copenhagen, Denmark,
Technical A Quik Look at QlikView Outside the world of Oracle, one of the rising stars of the BI world has been Qliktech, the Swedish software company behind QlikView [http://www.qlikview.com/]. QlikView is one of a new breed of desktop, in-memory BI tools [http://www.olapreport.com/Comment_InMemBI.htm] (see also the forthcoming
Technical Slightly Fuzzy Lookups Recently I had a requirement to selectively "translate" the data in one column of a table before loading into a data warehouse. In this case we had to "standardise" a list of countries. Normally, this is classic use of an outer join to a table containing
Technical Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – Sub-Totals during Drills – Conforming Dimensions I saw a peculiar requirement being discussed in a pentaho forum(i was actually browsing for some unique Pentaho features and stumbled upon the requirement) this week wherein end users wanted to get the sub-totals automatically while drilling on a dimension. In normal cases, i would have left it as
Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – Persistent Connection Pool – Converting In-Memory BI Server Processing to Temporary Tables One of the nice little features of the BI Server that is rarely used in a pure BI EE implementation is the Persistent Connection Pools. As you would probably know, BI Server adds one more layer of processing, if required, through its in-memory processing engine. For example, in the last
Book Review: Oracle Warehouse Builder 11g Getting Started (Packt Publishing, 2009) Packt Publishing got in contact recently and kindly offered to send some Oracle BI and Data Warehousing books over for review. The first one that was sent over was a new one on Essbase System 9 that I'll be reviewing shortly, but shortly afterwards a new one on
Technical A First Look at the BI Apps 7.9.5.2 Part 4: Customization In the first three parts of this series, I gave an overview of the new 7.9.5.2 release of the Oracle BI Applications [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/07/31/a-first-look-at-the-bi-apps-7-9-5-2-part-1-general-new-features/] , went through how the technology differs [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/08/01/a-first-look-at-the-bi-apps-7-9-5-2-part-2-technology-changes-between-odi-and-informatica/] now
Oh No! My BI Server has Core Dumped! As well as supporting client's development teams, we often come in and help support teams in client organizations who are taking on Oracle BI and EPM Suite. One such client I was working with this week wanted me to help them with an OBIEE diagnosis checklist, where their
Technical Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – Reporting on Non-Transactional Dimension values – Equivalence of Outer Joins As with any reporting tool BI EE works on the premise of converting the front-end column selection to the corresponding physical queries. But one of the advantages that makes BI EE stand apart from other reporting toolsets is its ability to do certain joins/sorting etc in-memory without pushing them
BI Training Days – BI EE, ODI, Essbase and BI Apps As you might have seen from Mark’s note here [http://www.rittmanmead.com/trainingdays2009/], we would be running the training days event this year from Oct 27th to Oct 29th in London . Mark, Myself and Christian would be personally delivering the training. If you are around during those days,
Technical A First Look at the BI Apps 7.9.5.2 Part 3: Performing a Data Load In the past couple of postings (here [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/07/31/a-first-look-at-the-bi-apps-7-9-5-2-part-1-general-new-features/] , here [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/08/01/a-first-look-at-the-bi-apps-7-9-5-2-part-2-technology-changes-between-odi-and-informatica/] ), I've gone through an introduction to the new BI Apps 7.9.5.2 release and talked about how the introduction of
BI Meetup at Open World San Francisco? UPDATE : The venue has now changed [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/10/06/oow-bi-meetup-change-of-venue/] to Johnny Foleys, in O'Farrell Street. One of the major benefits of going to Oracle Open World [http://www.oracle.com/openworld] is the chance to meet up with people you don'
Technical A First Look at the BI Apps 7.9.5.2 Part 2: Technology Changes Between ODI and Informatica So at the end of last week I posted an overview of the new 7.9.5.2 release of the Oracle BI Applications [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2009/07/31/a-first-look-at-the-bi-apps-7-9-5-2-part-1-general-new-features/] , which replaces Informatica and the DAC with Oracle Data Integrator and Configuration Manager. I said at the
Technical Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – Modeling Parent-Child Hierarchies – Using Federation One common issue that gets highlighted when someone uses BI EE is its inability to leverage Parent Child Hierarchies out of the box. 11g release scheduled sometime later next year is supposed to address this seamlessly. Having said that, being consultants ourselves most of the times we find ourselves in
Technical A First Look at the BI Apps 7.9.5.2 Part 1: General New Features If you've been wondering why I've not been posting to the blog recently, it's because I've been grappling with the new release of the Oracle BI Applications that uses Oracle Data Integrator as the ETL engine. This is an interesting release as
Technical Announcing Rittman Mead Training Days 2009, London I'm very pleased to announce details of our second-ever Training Days [http://www.rittmanmead.com/trainingdays2009] event, to be held at the Bloomsbury Hotel [http://www.doylecollection.com/locations/london_city_hotels/the_bloomsbury_hotel.aspx] in London on October 27th - 29th 2009. This year I'
Technical Using a Process Flow to loop through Months in a Table I hate having to maintain the same ETL logic in two different places; it violates everything I know about good coding practices. When using Java, PL/SQL, or even shell script, a good developer will modularize particular bits of his or her code to make sure distinct business logic is
Technical Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 & Essbase Connectivity – Repository Design – Enabling drills on Evaluate Columns – Part 1 One of the common questions that generally come up in the BI EE and Essbase integration is, how do we enable drills on Evaluate based columns. I have covered in detail here [http://oraclebizint.wordpress.com/workshop-series/] with regard to the usage of Evaluate based MDX functions. As of the
Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – Drills on Union Requests – Fragmentation One another issue with BI EE is the fact that, whenever we try to build a report with a Union All request, we would lose the capability of using repository based drills in the front-end. There was a question recently on how to overcome this limitation. This is very valid
Oracle BI EE 10.1.3.4.1 – Drills without Automatic Filters – Discoverer Style Drills – Repository Design One of the questions that i was asked recently is a means for doing discoverer style reporting in BI EE. As you might probably know, one of the major drawbacks of BI EE (atleast untill 11g comes out) is the fact that during drills we lose the information about other
