Dimension Filters in Tableau

Brian BurdiBig Data & BILeave a Comment

Dimension Filters in Tableau

Being able to toggle between dimensions or measures in Tableau is a nice feature to have when building a story for users or just on the dashboard. Being able to give the user the ability to do this is easy and can be done in a couple of steps. The first step to creating a toggle is to “Create Parameter…” in Tableau by right clicking on the left side of the program: To create the parameter here you have to change the data type to String and allowable values to list. Once you’re done with that you can type in … Read More

Hosting a Shiny App in Tableau

Brian BurdiBig Data & BI, Technical Tips1 Comment

Hosting a Shiny App in Tableau

Graphics in both Tableau and Shiny have their pluses and minuses. Tableau is good for drag and drop graphics that is easy to change the types of graphs given the situation with little to no coding. R/Shiny graphics are completely customizable from 3D graphics to violin plots, which is a boxplot that incorporates a probability density function. Also, with Shiny you can get summaries of the data and perform many other advanced statistical methods; beware of running analyses in Shiny without checking the proper diagnostic tests related to the data at hand (this is my statistics background speaking). Where Tableau … Read More

Tips on Developing Shiny Apps in RStudio Server

Brian BurdiBig Data & BI, Technical TipsLeave a Comment

Tips on Developing Shiny Apps in RStudio Server

Development from the RStudio Server is seamless to its desktop counterpart with the only difference being that you access it through your web browser. In fact, RStudio Server has some advantages because all you need is a computer that can connect to the internet and you’re using all of the server’s resources for computations rather than your local machine. This means that you can develop R code using a chromebook or tablet, in fact, I connected to my RStudio server on my iPhone and could code if I wanted but quickly found that it would be more of a hassle than it’s … Read More

Deploying a Shiny App on Shiny Server

Brian BurdiBig Data & BI, Technical TipsLeave a Comment

Deploying a Shiny App on Shiny Server

RStudio provides a free version on their Shiny Server for all to use. One of the drawbacks of the free version is that it will be public facing and you will not have a login. If you want to use Shiny Server to host sensitive data you will likely want to purchase the license to help protect your data. Getting a Shiny app hosted is easy, all you need to do is move your Shiny files to the following directory: /srv/shiny-server/ Once it’s there you will be able to share your apps with anyone with the following URL  http://<hostname>:3838/APP_NAME/.

What I Learned From Oracle’s BIWA Summit 2015 (Perspective from a Consulting Intern)

Brian BurdiEvents, Industry Trends, News and Updates, Oracle1 Comment

Our Big Data Team, here at M&S, packed up their bags and headed to San Francisco last week for the 2015 Oracle Business Intelligence Warehousing and Analytics Summit. Some of the major topics discussed included: Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, and Advanced Analytics. The Internet of Things (IoT) is at the peak of Gartner’s Hype Cycle. It is becoming increasingly talked about and there are predictions of billions and billions of sensors by 2020. But what exactly is IoT? IoT involves embedded computing devices interconnected with existing internet infrastructure, such as, wearables and connected cars. Why the hype right … Read More

A Commentary of Dual Axis Graphics

Brian BurdiTechnical TipsLeave a Comment

A Commentary of Dual Axis Graphics

My philosophy of visualizing data is keep it simple, you want the audience to look at a graph and know within a few moments what it is showing. The key is for accuracy in interpreting the graph and speed; we need to be careful of potentially distorting the data because we don’t want the audience to misinterpret the graph too quickly.  An easy way of distorting the data is changing the range of the axis which can cause the audience to believe there are more extreme changes in the data when there actually isn’t and the data is overall stable. … Read More

An Alternative to Using an Oracle BI Publisher Data Table for a One Line Table

Brian BurdiOracle, Technical TipsLeave a Comment

An Alternative to Using an Oracle BI Publisher Data Table for a One Line Table

When creating a one line table in Oracle BI Publisher using a Data Table, it will give you redundant filtering options on the titles of the table and an unnecessary subtotal at the end of the table if there is a fact in the table.   Instead, we would like to have a similar table but without the filters and the subtotal. To do this we will add a Layout Grid to the dimensions that we have predefined. This will give the overall BI Publisher report a much cleaner look by removing two of the features of the data table. … Read More

An Analysis Design that will Allow Users to Create Custom Reports in OBIEE

Brian BurdiOracle, Technical TipsLeave a Comment

An Analysis Design that will Allow Users to Create Custom Reports

Recently, I have been toying with the idea of having an OBIEE report that would allow the users to customize which columns would be shown in a particular report. This idea was going to be hard to execute because allowing users to customize the report that they would want to see on a dashboard would require the XML driving the analysis to change dynamically. A solution to this problem will not give the user 100% control of which columns are added to a report but it will allow them to have more control creating a report that they’re interested in. … Read More