Basic Understanding of OBIEE Report Vs BI Publisher Report

Hello All I recently came across a lot of beginners asking me questions about the difference between BI Publisher and OBIEE reports. To them, BI Publisher is either a 'different Feature' within OBIEE, or it's a completely different Application who competes with OBIEE in 'reporting business'. So today, i am hoping to make it easier to understand the difference between the two. BI Publisher was originally a different application, which is now part...

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Configure change password for users in OBIEE 11G

Hello In all OBIEE products, it is not so simple for users to change passwords themselves. The user accounts are typically managed by the Admin. This poses some realistic problems. Lets say I have a training environment set up and I have to make it available to a list of internal users for their daily activities. What do I do? I go create these users in Weblogic and access passwords to them. Do I send out one email to all of them with their username and password, since the password will be all the same?  Inevitably, the users are going request...

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Mathematically calculate the difference between month when the data is numeric 'yyyymm' in OBIEE

Hello I just found something fun and maybe useful to do in OBIEE. Calculating the difference between timestamps is pretty easy by using timestamp diff function. When it comes to calculating the difference between month, I know 'sql_tsi_month' can be used, which will give you results in month. However, you don't always want to put date columns into the equation if your report is aggregating at monthly level, and sometimes the date column is simply...

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De-mystify OBIEE with Big Data Integration

Hello there I know over the last few years, the word 'big data' has become all of the tech world. People talk about it, project management talks about, even those that don't know anything about anything talks about it as if when throwing words like 'cloud computing', 'Hadoop', 'Map Reduce' into the conversation makes one person sound that much smarter and sophisticated. Big Data is a concept, which has been done for many years, it's just that it wasn't well-known until much later. The concept is powerful yet simple. This is the product of the...

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A comprehensive way to understand Oracle BI Apps

As you spend more time developing reports using OBIEE, you will realize that the needs for better and more optimized data models and ETL frameworks become more important. You realize that most of the time required to spend is on designing database schemas, tables and objects as well as ETL frameworks to load the data into analytic warehouse. Needless to say, the time required to research and understand the specific business process and subject matter is more crucial than the technical implementation. Often, millions of dollars and years of time...

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Oracle DAC interview questions and answers

Oracle DAC is an essential part of BI Apps, which is seldom being introduced in a systematic training course, although we use them all the time. There can be quite a lot of things to ask about when it comes to working with DAC, especially during interviews for BI Apps related projects. So I am going to gather some of the common interview questions with regard to DAC. 1. Name some of the DAC source system parameters: TYPE2_FLAG, GLOBOL1_CURR_CODE,...

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Understanding the implementation of value based hierarchy (parent-child) in OBIEE 11G

Hello As we all know, from 11g onwards, the feature of implementing value based hierarchy is available. There are several great articles out there that explains the steps of such implementation in 11G, therefore I am not going to repeat these things. What I want to talk about is more of a concept of value based hierarchy implementation, which will hopefully answer the questions that a lot of beginners reading about this topic may have as such "How do I know the right table structures for this type of hierarchy?" As we know, employee dimension...

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Navigating between reports and dashboards when there is no common fields to pass parameters

Hello All Today I want to talk about navigating between reports and dashboards. As we all know, this feature can be done in 11G through action frameworks, this allows us to click on any particular value of the actionlink defined column and navigate us to another dashboard page (BI Content if we choose it in the actionlink) and the value we clicked previously will be filtered. This is a pretty standard feature that has been part of OBIEE product...

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Calling Javascript function from OBIEE dashboard

Hello again This time I am going to show how to call javascript function from OBIEE dashboard. The script can be written and saved in the common.js file located in: OBIEE_Folder/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/servers/bi_server1/tmp/_WL_user/analytics_11.1.1/7dezjl/war/res/b_mozilla/common.js I have written a simple script as the follow and I saved it in the bottom of the common.js file: // MY Stuff function obi_popup() { alert("Hello...

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Restarting all OBIEE 11G domain services in linux and common issues

Hello Although there are a lot of articles out there that talks about how to restart OBIEE 11G, I find them tend to be less clear to beginners. Trust me, if you have just started using 11G, you will find out that there are some common issues that you will run into when you are restarting your OBIEE system. So today, I want to gets these things straighten out. Let's start and assume that your OBIEE is already up and running, and you have made some...

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Upgrading OBIEE from 10G to 11G and post upgrade activities Part 2

From the previous entry of this series, we went through what was like to upgrade OBIEE 10G to 11G, which was not bad. We also covered some of the post upgrade activities that we pretty much had to do for the system to start working. This time, I want to expand on that and add one more post upgrade activity that is almost a must for everybody going from 10g to 11g. In order for 11G to successfully connect to the DB and fetch data, we must have the proper Tnsname file stored on the server machine. Normally, the Tnsname file is stored in the OracleDB...

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How to locate the reoccurring character in the string

Hello Here is an interesting requirement. Look at the below report: You notice that all of the PWE IDs have 3 '_'. Now I want to know the location of the last '_' in the string, what do I do? OBIEE has locate and LocateN function at our disposal. However, the locateN function doesn't work that well, but the Locate Function does work. So let's start with that: Create a new column and enter: LOCATE('_', Pseudowire."PWE ID", -1) the '-1'...

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Working with Go URL and passing parameters to dashboards and reports

Hello It's been a while. Today, I am going to talk about GO URL and how to make it work. This can be very handy once you make it work.  The idea of GO URL is that, it will be able to navigate to other BI Contents, such as reports and dashboards while passing certain parameters along. This can be very useful if you are coming from external application navigating into OBIEE.  So let's look at a few URLs I wrote and we will break it down: 1....

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