OBIEE: Dynamically calculate quarterly difference without using time series function

Sometimes, you have a custom report built from custom schema, it could be a materialized view or view that were custom made, where the number is at a certain granularity without hierarchy defined. Like you have a quarterly report, but now the requirement is to display the numbers not only in the quarter that user pick, but also display the previous quarter of that user defined quarter along. Not only that, you also need to display the difference between the quarters as well as the monthly measures under these 2 quarters. Like the report below for instance:

As you can see from the report, the user just pick 2014 Q3 and the report comes back with Q3 as well as Q2 data with month and quarter column pivoted. Now the pivot view allows us to get the total per quarter, which as you can see, is done. Now the challenge is, how are we going calculate the difference between these 2 quarterly difference?


So, let me go back a little bit. Before I got to the report was you can see, I created a new column in the RPD which brings Year and Quarter concatenated based on what this table have. In other words, i take '2014' and '3', then concatenated it 'Q' in the middle to get you 2014 Q3. 'Trim' function is used here to get rid of any unwanted spaces that is trailing as a result of converting number into string.

The next step I decided to do is to create a simple report which takes the user input quarter value, then it should return that quarter value as well as the previous quarter value using the rpd column that I just created above.

In the above report, 'Current Year Quarter' is nothing but the RPD column, the Previous Year QTR has the following formula that returns the previous Quarter:

Since the time dimension does have Date (DATE_VALUE) column, by doing timestampadd at month level with '-3' will automatically give you the month that is 3 month prior to the month of that corresponding DATE_VALUE. It also needs to address the fact that the prior quarter of Q1 should be Q4 of the previous year, therefore a case statement is embedded to take care of this situation:

TRIM(TRAILING ' ' FROM CAST(case when "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."QUARTER" = 1 then "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."YEAR" - 1 else "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."YEAR" end AS CHAR))||' '||'Q'||Trim(trailing ' ' from cast(QUARTER_OF_YEAR(timestampadd(sql_tsi_month,-3,"- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."DATE_VALUE")) as char))

After concatenating these components together, it finally gives me what I want:

This report will be accepting the presentation variable from the dashboard prompt quarter, so i call it 'Quarter'. Save this report as 'Previous Quarter'.

Now, go back to the main report that I have been creating as you can see below:

Here in the filter section, the Year&Quarter column (which is the new RPD column) is getting value from 'Current Year Quarter' OR from 'Previous Year Column' of the report 'Previous Quarter' created above. This means that when user select 2014 Q3 from the dashboard, it will return 2014 Q3 and 2014 Q2, both will be passed to year&quarter column of this report through this filter condition. Then by pivoting the quarter and month column, it will display the view that you saw.

Now the second thing is to come up with a way to calculate difference of these 2 quarters. Unfortunately, this will have to be done with a different calculation because time series function will make it very complicated and difficult to validate the logic.

So first thing is to find a way to calculate the measure for each of the quarter and it's previous quarter. This can be done using 'filter' function by making the Year&Quarter column equal 'current quarter' or 'previous quarter' from report 'Previous quarter'.

As it turns out, OBIEE does allow to use filter function with nested query, so this is what the expression looks like below:

FILTER(ifnull(FACT."Accounted Net USD",0) + ifnull(FACT."Accounted Net USD",0) USING ("- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" IN (SELECT saw_0 FROM (SELECT "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" saw_0, TRIM(TRAILING ' ' FROM CAST(case when "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."QUARTER" = 1 then "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."YEAR" - 1 else "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."YEAR" end AS CHAR))||' '||'Q'||Trim(trailing ' ' from cast(QUARTER_OF_YEAR(timestampadd(sql_tsi_month,-3,"- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."DATE_VALUE")) as char)) saw_1 FROM "FB - Custom Views for Oracle Financials" WHERE "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" IN ('@{Quarter}')) nqw_1 ))) -  FILTER(ifnull(FACT."Accounted Net USD",0) + ifnull(FACT."Accounted Net USD",0) USING ("- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" IN (SELECT saw_1 FROM (SELECT "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" saw_0, TRIM(TRAILING ' ' FROM CAST(case when "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."QUARTER" = 1 then "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."YEAR" - 1 else "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."YEAR" end AS CHAR))||' '||'Q'||Trim(trailing ' ' from cast(QUARTER_OF_YEAR(timestampadd(sql_tsi_month,-3,"- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."DATE_VALUE")) as char)) saw_1 FROM "FB - Custom Views for Oracle Financials" WHERE "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" IN ('@{Quarter}')) nqw_1 )))

Now the break down of this expression is below:

(Below will get you Current month measure)
FILTER(ifnull(FACT."Accounted Net USD",0) + ifnull(FACT."Accounted Net USD",0) USING
("- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" IN
----- (The red part is the measure that we are dealing with)


(SELECT saw_0 FROM (SELECT "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" saw_0, TRIM(TRAILING ' ' FROM CAST(case when "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."QUARTER" = 1 then "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."YEAR" - 1 else "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."YEAR" end AS CHAR))||' '||'Q'||Trim(trailing ' ' from cast(QUARTER_OF_YEAR(timestampadd(sql_tsi_month,-3,"- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."DATE_VALUE")) as char)) saw_1 FROM "FB - Custom Views for Oracle Financials" WHERE "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" IN ('@{Quarter}')) nqw_1 )))  
---- this is the other report that we created earlier, presentation variable needs to be entered here, saw_0 represent 'current year and quarter' from that report

 -
(Below will get you previous month measure)
FILTER(ifnull(FACT."Accounted Net USD",0) + ifnull(FACT."Accounted Net USD",0)

USING ("- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" IN

(SELECT saw_1 FROM (SELECT "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" saw_0, TRIM(TRAILING ' ' FROM CAST(case when "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."QUARTER" = 1 then "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."YEAR" - 1 else "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."YEAR" end AS CHAR))||' '||'Q'||Trim(trailing ' ' from cast(QUARTER_OF_YEAR(timestampadd(sql_tsi_month,-3,"- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."DATE_VALUE")) as char)) saw_1 FROM "FB - Custom Views for Oracle Financials" WHERE "- XXFB_TIME_DIMENSION"."Year&Quarter" IN ('@{Quarter}')) nqw_1 )))
 --- saw_1 represents the 'previous year and quarter' from that report 

Now, test the new report:

It's working nicely..

Thanks

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OBIEE vs Tableau Report

Having used both technologies quite extensively, I can't help but to make some comparisons between the 2 tools.

For those that are not quite familiar with Tableau, it is a pretty cool technology that also provides very good look and feels of the reports. It is a pretty popular technology in a lot of companies.

Here are some of the cool things that tableau has to offer:
1.
Tableau allows developers to bypass the metadata design and go directly into the report building phases. In other words, there is no equivalence of Admin Tool in Tableau. You develop your SQL or PL/SQL, you then create reports and views based on this SQL. This allows the development to be very flexible because there is no needs for dimensional modeling. You can join as many tables, create as many self-joins, making as many snowflake or normalizations of dimensions as you want, as long as your query is giving you the right data, you can put it in tableau and it becomes the report you want. The same thing in OBIEE would probably have to be done through custom views or materialized views, which will still need to be migrated across the 3 layers in Admin tool.

2.
Tableau makes mapview much easier to build. All you need is spatial data in your table: latitude and Longitude and city. Once these fields are in your query, it will show up in tableau with different Icons letting you know they are available. You can then putting in the mapview and the map will be generated with every city in your table on the map. This process is much simpler than doing the same in OBIEE.

3.
The latest versions of Tableau provides your calender for any date filters (I am surprised it took this long for such important feature to come up ). The date filter has some pretty cool features that it allows users to not only filter based on dates, but also provides other filtering options such as 'last 2 weeks', 'last 2 months', 'between each Monday' with all just a click away. This can also be done in OBIEE but will require the use of variables, which will table some engineering.

4.
Tableau report allows users to pick their own filters while viewing the report. In OBIEE, the user will normally have to contact the report developers if they want to change filters and prompts.

5. The common features that OBIEE has, such as agents and navigation among reports and views can also be found in tableau.

6 Tableau is less complicated in its server architecture compared with OBIEE and weblogic.

On the other hand, there are some downside of tableau as well compared with OBIEE:

1.One of the main thing about Tableau is that it doesn't seem to have a query engine. This means it will try to query the entire DB first before applying any filters. This will cause a lot of overheads and oftenly at a enterprise level of reporting, the Tableau server is less stable than OBIEE because of the size of the Data they are dealing with.

2.For enterprise reporting, there might be reports that has to go through auditing to meet certain compliance based on the formatting and other things. OBIEE reporting has been tested for this purpose while Tableau will still have to be trialed and tested. What's the use of having all of the fancy reports that don't pass the auditing?

3.Another disadvantage of Tableau, which can be major for some companies, is that it doesn't allow writebacks. We all know that OBIEE has a writeback feature, which allows report users to update records on the dashboard without having to go to DB. This can be important in a lot of the financial reporting that the users typically would want to update certain records during their month-end closing. This feature is absent in Tableau.

Overall, Tableau is more of a point solution rather than enterprise-wise solution like OBIEE. But Tableau is way less costly than OBIEE and much more flexible in it's design, which also means that the level of SQL Programming for Tableau is much higher than in OBIEE.

I hope this helps

 

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