A mid-sized federal government contracting company had been using Oracle E-Business Suite for many years. The good news for the company was that it had experienced monumental growth and opened new business lines. The bad news was that their Oracle environment had accumulated a lot of deferred maintenance and was an out-of-date version which could lead to Oracle desupport, risking their government compliance and contracts. In addition, with their changing business models, the system needed new functionality which required additional Oracle modules. They needed to find a competent partner, quickly. …documentation was sparse, despite heavy customization, and high turnover meant … Read More
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
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
Is Oracle’s Vision Corp Guilty of Gender Inequality? An OBIEE Analysis to Investigate Reports
Allegations of Vision Corporation’s activity in gender salary discrimination is something that Oracle’s Vision Corp takes very seriously and have been generous enough to open up all of their information for independent analysis by the public. We will begin an investigation of their full time employee’s salary information to see if the allegations of gender salary discrimination are prevalent in this corporation. We will be using OBIEE 11.1.1.6.0 to investigate. The first thing we will look at is a generated table and pie chart that calculates the number of employees by their gender. We can see that there is a … Read More
Enabling the Auto-Complete Prompt Functionality in OBIEE 11.1.1.6
OBIEE 11.1.1.6 has an auto-complete prompt feature which when enabled allows users to begin typing a selection in the prompts and OBIEE will suggest and highlight the matching prompt values. This option is only available on the “Choice List” when “Enable user to type values” is selected. When the following code is implemented will also allow the auto-complete to be case insensitive. 1. Navigate to: 1 $MW_HOME/instances/instance1/config/OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent/coreapplication_obips1$MW_HOME/instances/instance1/config/OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent/coreapplication_obips1 2. Open instanceconfig.xml file (make a backup of the file prior to making any changes). 3. Add the following code between the <ServerInstance> … </ServerInstance><ServerInstance> … </ServerInstance> tags: <Prompts> <MaxDropDownValues>256</MaxDropDownValues> <AutoApplyDashboardPromptValues>true</AutoApplyDashboardPromptValues> <AutoSearchPromptDialogBox>true</AutoSearchPromptDialogBox> <AutoCompletePromptDropDowns> … Read More
Modifying the Caching Parameters for OBIEE 11g
The Oracle BI Presentation Services caching could be an issue with high volume and large queries. A solution may be to limit the amount that can be cached. Currently, the default maximum entries are set at 500 for a maximum of 60 minutes. The path of the BI Presentation cache is found in: 1 ORACLE_INSTANCE\tmp\OracleBIPresentationServices\coreapplication_obipsn\obis_tempORACLE_INSTANCE\tmp\OracleBIPresentationServices\coreapplication_obipsn\obis_temp One way of working around this would be to limit the caching parameters in the BI Presentation Services by modifying the instanceconfig.xml file in the following path: 1 ORACLE_INSTANCE\config\OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent\coreapplication_obipsnORACLE_INSTANCE\config\OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent\coreapplication_obipsn 1. Open the instanceconfig.xml file 2. Locate the section in which you must add the elements … Read More
OBIEE 11g Selection Steps and Filters: Their Differences and How to Use the Two
Selection steps and filters in OBIEE 11g analyses overall serve a similar purpose by limiting the data for the user. Filters are applied before the query is aggregated meaning that it could affect calculations and measures because the query is affected. Whereas selections steps are applied after the query is aggregated meaning that the only thing that is affected is what the user will see, this will not affect calculations and measures. Filters can be applied to attribute and measure columns while selection steps can be applied to attribute and hierarchical columns. The selection steps work incrementally so you should … Read More
Formatting a Field Globally in OBIEE 11g
Some fields will have a standard way of being formatted, such as a date DD-MMM-YYYY or a dollar amount being set $x,xxx.xx. Having to format the field each time that a user wants to use it becomes quite burdensome and gives a developer more room for error if they are formatting the field each time it is used. The saying “work smarter, not harder” comes to mind with this solution. For this example we will globally change the format of the field “revenue” to the format $x,xxx.xx. Let’s open an analysis and for the sake of seeing the format prior … Read More