OBIEE Blog

This image – apparently copyrighted by A. Abela (thank you very much, by the way) – is a great starting point for deciding which chart to choose. Of course, OBIEE currently doesn’t support some of them (such as Variable width column chart) – but I think it’s a very good illustration on various chart types. The chart is available here:
Chart

Also, please check this presentation with some og the AJAX/HTML 5 chart examples – Cool charts – link here
Those are small things – but they could get a lot of brownie points for developers – they would make OBIEE look hip and modern. I really loved the interactive bouncing charts. Not terribly original – but they do create a better experience. Think about users!

I think that the future hold tighter web integration (xml / ajax) for BI systems as well as some great UI. Just look at Iphone – their UI was one of the major reasons for their success. I noticed the trend that many products get that slick look (salesforce, qlickview) – and I hope OBIEE 11G isn’t far behind. I’ve not had a chance to look at it hand-on (just screenshots from presentations) – but again – I hope that product managers looks closely into user experience. The latest version isn’t bad at all – but it’s not far away from distant siebel analytics’s screen/layout. I hope developers would get the facility to customize front-end more liberaly (right now – it involves a lot of xml hacking if you go beyond some CSS stylesheets).

Best wishes.

Thanksgiving holiday, pre-Christmas routine, and a general lethargic state due to the weather. They don’t help us to write more about OBIEE. Also, I have a feeling that everyone has a feeling that all OBIEE topics have been covered. So everyone is just waiting for 11g – and then there’ll be a race.

RNM1978 posted a very good visual representation of OBIEE documentation – http://rnm1978.wordpress.com/2009/11/27/i-think-this-summarises-everything/
From one side, bad documentation has opened a niche for experts to blog and discover new things. On the other hand – if it’s not in the docs – it’s probably not covered by Oracle’s support – so some companies might be wary of installing new things.

As far as a new forum – I’m still working on identifying an open-source forum platform that would have all features that OTN has and more. There’re some candidates – but I’m still in the process of search.

I will be honest – I still check OTN – however, I give it a quick glance and then just leave. I still give respect to everyone who’s answering questions, however silly lazy ones. I’m wondering if the influx of new OBIEE will contribute to rates pushed down in the future. For one thing I’m sure now that there’re 2 different kind of “freshers” – one making a transition from another BI tool (Cognos, MS Analysis Services, Discoverer) or a closely-related area (Oracle data warehousing, OLAP) and those who have taken “$600 courses”. It’s very conflicting – since everyone has to start somewhere. However, starting by spamming OTN isn’t the right way to do it.

This is why I was actually against point system when it was implemented – it incentives seasoned consultants reply to silly questions – the ones they would have left without attention before.

Anyway, I hope everyone had a nice break! Back to work! And please stay healthy and well.

A. “Ago function returning wrong results in answer when comparing this year versus last year” This actually happened to me once – and i thought it was an incorrectly configured time dimension. You can experience this error when your “Time Series functions gives incorrect results when leap years are involved”. Oracle support suggested the following action plan :

1) Leave the logical column definition as earlier i.e. Ago(Measure, Year, 1)
2) Change the filter condition in the request to filter on year and months instead of date range e.g.
year = 2009 and month in (1,2,3,4)

B. “Value Suppression doesn’t work for Level Based Measures”. Someone had a requirement where they wanted to use level-based measures for reports accessing several fact tables in the future. To realize a prototype before starting with the necessary reports they tried to implement an easy example to test the ‘value suppression’ functionality

Unfortunately they are not able to build a nice looking report with four simple columns showing the year, # of orders (per year), quarter and # orders. Their problem is that the level based measure ‘# of order (per year)’ is shown line by line. They wanted to suppress these values and only show the value once per year. They tried to use the ‘value suppression functionality’ without success. They were able to Work around this issues by using a Pivot Table.

C. This issue in pivot table is very common –

OBIEE says “governor exceeded error”. The pivot tables and the charts might give these errors:

Error Generating Chart
An exception occurred in the cube.
Error Details
Error Codes: MOJ5XVNL:QBVC92JY
Governor limit exceeded in cube generation (Maximum data records exceeded.)

and for pivot table

View Display Error
Governor limit exceeded in cube generation (Maximum data records exceeded.)
Error Details
Error Codes: QBVC92JY

Theses messages mean that users are trying to return more rows to the pivot table then the governor will allow. One needs to adjust the following parameters until the report runs successfully.

Adjust the parameters below in instanceconfig.xml (add those tags if you don’t have them – since those values are by default) and then restart Presentation Server (sawserver)

< CubeMaxRecords >40000< /CubeMaxRecords >
< CubeMaxPopulatedCells >150000< /CubeMaxPopulatedCells >

One thing that’s making the serious IT consulting field less desirable for a lot of people is the constant need for learning new things. Learning by reading blogs, studying new documentation, and constantly experimenting with new features. nQuire / Siebel Analytics / OBIEE has evolved into a very complex product – and clients often expect one person to be proficient in everything, starting from ETL and ending with BI Publisher. I know several people who’re indeed masters in all products, and they could probably complete a BI project single-handedly (from planning to execution, from ETL specs to data modelling, from OBIEE repository design to front-end customizations). However, such knowledge doesn’t come for free. These people put a lot of extra time into learning new things as well as polishing their existing ones. In the end, it pays off, because they can commend higher rates and it’s what they love – it’s something they can be passionate about.

I haven’t written much lately for several reasons – the major one – dealing with the new project, getting into loop of things. Second one, I’m having much fun reading some new blogs (to which I will definitely link once I find some time). Third, it has something to do with being in New York in the fall. It’s a magnificent city, but it’s very demanding – sometimes I feel it’s taking all my energy. Last reason, it’s more and more difficult to come up with new posts.

Have a good week-end! Stay well! (don’t catch a cold like I did)

This is a very interesting post Taking a Look at Panorama and Google Apps. Mark is comparing some quick OLAP solutions with OBIEE.

Mark shows some limitations of those products, however, he also mentions that it’s a big improvement on what’s been available before.

Should Oracle be threatened? I don’t think so. Even though BI is a lucrative market for anyone, the cost of entry is way too high, even for a company like google. Sales reps take years to develop solid client relationships, and even though Google might take a stab at that by poaching Oracle’s talent – I seriously doubt it.

Finally, I don’t think google’s tool is positioned to compete with OBIEE.