BI Office in 10.1.3.3 - Clipboard

What's this clipboard you keep talking about?

The clipboard (we don't really have an official name for it) lets you copy BI views from Answers or Dashboards and into Excel or PowerPoint using the BI Office Add-in as native Office charts or tables. It makes inserting BI content into Office documents simple as 1-2 (one-click to copy, one-click to paste).

The beginning:
As a sort of history into the evolution of this feature, when we first started discussing it last year, we wanted to implement something different, a sort of a Windows independent clipboard. People would be able to copy a BI object into the clipboard from Answers or Dashboards, and then a user from Excel or PowerPoint would access that network based clipboard, and insert views. Some iterations later, after discussions between the development teams – the BI Office and the Presentation Services teams – we realized that we could do it in an easier and more user-friendly way. What if we simply copied, into the Windows clipboard, the fully qualified name and path to the BI view that you copied. That would read something like "#shared/Paint Demo/Sales Summaries/Regional Analysis/Regional Revenue|ChartView1" for a chart view named 'ChartView1' in request named "Regional Revenue" that was located under the Shared : Paint Demo : Sales Summaries : Regional Analysis folder path.. Since it was in your Windows clipboard, you wouldn’t need a separate component or product to manage its contents. That worked quite well. Till we started thinking some more. (yes, insightful thought is really a binary process... it can be off for stretches of time, and then when it switches on it can cause a lot of Eureka moments, and some of them with clothes on. Note to self: STOP with these non-sequiturs.) The thought was, wouldn’t it be really, really nice if we could allow users to copy a view in any state (as in let them copy when they are in California, Nevada, Karnataka, and so on). Huh? (Abhinav - these silly and infantile witticisms were cute the first hundred times, not any more!). Let me explain. Consider a Dashboard page. Let’s take the demo Dashboard page that ships with the product.


In-place drilling: Now, on this page I can do at least two different things as they relate to the BI clipboard functionality. Firstly, I can do an in-place drill into a view. Take this pie chart for example, that displays dollar sales by region:

I can drill into the 'Eastern Region' so that it now displays the breakup of sales for the districts in the 'Eastern Region':

How to setup in-place drilling:
I got an in-pace drill here because that’s the way the chart has been setup in Dashboards. If you were to edit the dashboard, this is what you would see:



Copying the state of a view:
At this point, this chart has changed from its original definition.

While the original chart showed me dollar sales by region (the SQL would be: SELECT Markets.Region saw_0, "Sales Measures".Dollars saw_1 FROM Paint ORDER BY saw_0), (see below)


this drilled chart is showing me dollar sales for districts in the 'Eastern Region' (the SQL is: SELECT Markets.Region saw_0, "Markets"."District" saw_1, "Sales Measures".Dollars saw_2 FROM Paint WHERE "Markets"."Region" = 'EASTERN REGION' ORDER BY saw_0, saw_1).



If I were to have my BI clipboard working like it was designed initially, you would not be able to copy this modified view. What would get copied would be the original definition of the view. You would copy the chart and when pasted inside Excel or PowerPoint, it would be the chart with sales by region. Good, but not quite there, right? There’s got to be a better way. And indeed there is. What helped was the knowledge that the presentation services framework has a pretty good state management capability that the BI Office product and the clipboard could leverage. What do I mean? Well, consider this: when I click the 'print' link/button on a Dashboard page, the state of the Dashboard page is maintained and passed to the server that then generates a PDF or HTML version of the dashboard page, sans the header and other chrome that is unwanted in a printer-friendly version of the page. What the team then decided is, let’s copy the state of the chart into the clipboard. What I mean is, the chart in its current state – sales by district for 'Eastern' region – can be represented by appropriate XML that describes the chart, its format, as well as the metadata that it is displaying. Cool! What does it look like? It? The XML I mean.

The XML


Ewww. That’s not nice. This is not fit even for a PG audience. But you asked for it, sir. The XML is not pretty, but at least you can scan through it to notice some things that the XML contains:

- the name of the subject area: 'Paint'
- the columns contained in the request (dollars, region, district)
- the filter (on region)
- the filter value: 'EASTERN REGION'
- all the views contained in the request - the compound view, the title view, the chart view, the column selector, etc...
- details about the chart view, including the sub-type (2D), the fill color, etc...

If you copy this view, and then paste it in Excel or PowerPoint using the BI Office Add-in's 'Paste' button, the BI Office ‘Paste’ button can turn this XML into something pretty in a jiffy, like this:




Ah. That’s good. I likes it.
What else can I do with the clipboard?
Well... let’s see. You can’t take it home to your mom. Nor can you take it out on a date. But you can go to PowerPoint and paste it there. The BI clipboard can take the same XML and turn it into beautiful Office charts in both Excel and PowerPoint. Let me correct that – it can turn XML into Office charts in both Excel and PowerPoint.

The chart above has inherited the color scheme of the PowerPoint template I am using.


The chart above has inherted the default color scheme as this is a new PowerPoint presentation.

Pasting a Table View
That’s all fine. A picture is worth a thousand words. But what if I wanted those actual thousand words? What if I wanted a table to be pasted into Excel? With many rows. Many, many rows, more than a thousand rows? Well... be my guest.
Take this longer-than-a-picture table with close to 1200 rows.




Copy it.


Go to Excel and paste it.


There you go.

Pasting a Pivot View
Not happy with a table? Prefer a Pivot View? No problem.
Here’s the Answers Pivot View.


And here’s the pasted view pasted in Excel:



I see. Obviously, Abhinav, you are showing things that you had thought of. Yes sir, and that was quite an effort. But what about compound views? What if I had a table, and a chart, and another table, and a pivot view, and yet another chart, and .... yeah yeah yeah – I see you like compound views. Let’s take a case. Is this the sort of compound view you were referring to?


Yes. Ok. Sure.
No problem.
1 click to copy.
1 click to paste.




Each table view and pivot view is pasted onto a separate Excel sheet. The chart views can share the same sheet as a table or pivot view. Therefore, in this case, the four views from the request in Answers have been pasted onto two sheets in Excel.

But wait! I saw something there!!! What’s this?

That sir, is not a wardrobe malfunction (wouldn't that be embarassing?). It’s not even a clipboard malfunction. The honest fact of the matter is (you know I am upto no good when I preface a sentence with ‘to be perfectly honest’, ‘frankly speaking’) that we do not yet support all the views known to the Presentation Services. Therefore, we do not sneak around by not even telling you that these views have not been pasted.

Ok, ok, Mahatma Gandhi. But this may get on my nerves. Seeing this message everytime I paste a BI view that contains a title view.
I agree.
So are you going to do something about it??
Yes.
What?
Go here:


Check this box, or uncheck it to not see the message about unsupported views.

And that marks the end of the post on the BI clipboard.
IOW, Elvis has left the building.

BI Publisher Discoverer integration 2

Let’s take a little closer but brief look at this entire integration (between BI Publisher and Discoverer of course!) in a little more detail.
Architecture, configuration, optimizations, all come a bit later - let's approach this from a more end user perspective.

This below is a Discoverer worksheet. A table actually. Shows me Profits, Sales, by Year, Region, and City. Plain vanilla report - took me less than five minutes to create it (probably closer to two, but then I was not timing myself).


This Discoverer worksheet also has two parameters (parameters are the equivalent of conditions whose values are specified and applied at run time) - one on Year and the other on Region. For those coming from the BI EE world (that would be Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition), parameters are the equivalent of 'prompts' in Answers. And these parameters have LOVs (that would be “List of Values”, and not some vulgarism or cute colloquialism).
The two parameters also have default values - 1998 for Year, and 'West' for Region. This is useful for reasons we shall see later (in other words - 'trust me, I know what I am doing').


What I want to do is create a report in BI Publisher that uses this Discoverer worksheet as the data source.
While I go about describing that process here, please do excuse my graphical loquacity (i.e. I shall use more screenshots than you may need or want, but this isn't about needs or wants).
Go to BI Publisher and create a new report under a folder of your choice.
But first you have to login.

Here is the folder I created ("Blog" under "Abhinav" under "Shared Folders").
And the report I created is "Simple_Discoverer_1" (I do have a gift with names).


Now, this report is empty. No data, no template.


So if you click the "View" link above, you would see that the report template dropdown is blank, and clicking "View" would return nothing.

This is good, because you do not want an empty report with no data and no layout to get possessed...
What we need to do first is specify where the data is coming from. We know where the data is coming from – a Discoverer worksheet – but we need to tell BI Publisher that, right? Prescient computing is still some ways off (hmm... there's an idea).
Create a new data model first. That sounds difficult? No it isn’t. Simply click 'Data Model' and then click the 'New' icon.


After you do that, select ‘Discoverer’ from the dropdown (here you see the first glimpse of the functionality that is new in BI Publisher and germane to this post on Discoverer integration), and then click the two searchlights/torchlights and pick your Discoverer connection and workbook/worksheet.


See all the arrows in the screenshot below? After your data set has been defined, click 'Save' (would it be a good idea to have an 'auto-save' type functionality here?)


Done that? Good. You are good to go – at least in terms of viewing your data via BI Publisher. Click the 'View' link and you can already see a couple of things.
Firstly, the Discoverer parameters are now available here in BI Publisher. And the default values have been pre-selected.
Secondly, since I had specified in the Discoverer workbook that these parameters could accept multiple values, the LOV in BI Publisher appears as a multi-select list box. If these had been single value parameters, these would have been dropdowns so you could select only one value.


Thirdly, you can view the data, but there is no formatting or layout, still. That again is expected. After all, we haven't associated a template with this report yet. But you can see the XML here. It's in a rowset form, and the Discoverer web services have done this. And this is perhaps the most critical part of the whole integration. It doesn't really matter how the data gets from Discoverer to BI Publisher, as long as it is in this format - rowset - that BI Publisher understands and can work with.


Scheduling and Distribution
Before we (I am using the royal pronoun here... there's only me writing this post, right?) get into the template building part where you can use the formatting capabilities of Microsoft Word to create nice looking reports with BI data in it, let’s see just what we can do with this bare bones report that has no template associated with it.
Specifically, I want to try out two things (things always have to be exposited in twos and threes when I speak - annoying habit).
Firstly, and this is what many Discoverer customers want to do; schedule and distribute Discoverer content to users.
So, click the ‘Schedule’ button, which takes you to the BI Publisher scheduler. There, change the parameters if you want to, or leave them as they are. Set up a schedule – for convenience I chose to run the job immediately. Furthermore, specify that you want to destination to be email. My email. But of course.



All done? Click the ‘History’ link, and there is my scheduled job, with a green status icon of ‘Success’ (I thought of another non-sequitur on 'success' and 'green', but let's leave that for another day).

Now all I have to do is wait for the email. And there it is. In my inbox – I see the mail, and there is the attachment – “attachment.xml”.


In the next post I shall talk about making pretty reports from your Discoverer worksheets in BI Publisher (you see, I can talk English, I can walk English, I can laugh English - a Hindi movie reference if you must know).

BI Office in 10.1.3.3

One of the two biggest features in the 10.1.3.3 release is the Office Add-in - properly known as 'Oracle Business Intelligence for Microsoft Office' (see other posts on 10.1.3.3)

You can go to OTN to download the software (see this post for download links).
This is the New Features doc, which has a chapter on the Office Add-in.
And once you install the client add-ins you can view the online help too - these are available as CHM files from the add-in's help menu.

So what's new in the new Add-in (is that a tautology)?
I can rattle off many, many features in BI Office, but for my money I would pick these four:

• A revamped Excel Add-in and a new PowerPoint Add-in.
• Ability to insert BI charts as refreshable images or even Flash objects.
• A really, really, nice feature that we call the BI Clipboard.
• Ability to drilling in Excel tables in offline mode.

While I shall get into some details on the add-in in future posts, I wanted to show some screenshots of how your presentations and spreadsheets can look like with data inserted from this BI Add-in. Other features such as the BI clipboard, support for levels, prompts, etc... I shall cover in subsequent posts.

Consider these screenshots of PowerPoint with charts inserted using the BI Office Add-in.
The first screenshot shows you six slides, all charts.

The second screenshot above, on the right, shows the same presentation secured using the 'Secure Oracle BI Data' button.

Here below is a similar screenshot of the BI Office Add-in with Microsoft Excel 2007. I have multiple worksheets in the workbook, each has a combination of tables, native Office charts, BI charts inserted as images. You can notice that some of the charts are the same as the ones I used in the presentation screenshots above. Of course - BI charts are available in both Excel and PowerPoint. Also visible is the BI Presentation catalog that you use to browse your requests and insert them into your spreadsheets.



The other nice feature is the Secure feature. One-click. Again. One click is what it takes to secure an Excel sheet. Tables, flat data views, charts, images, all. One click is what it takes to secure an entire PowerPoint presentation - tables, charts, images, even Flash objects. And one-click to refresh. Take a look:
This below is a worksheet from the same Excel file that I showed above.


With a single click (well... you could argue that buttons are meant to be clicked once, but I have had the misery of knowing and working for people who would double-click twice on buttons as well as hyperlinks, and they have done quite well in life too, so maybe that's what I have been doing wrong all these years: not double-clicking on links and buttons) I can secure all the data in the worksheet.

And with a single click again, I can choose to refresh the worksheet or the entire workbook.


And with that ends the first episode.
I shall be back (or does it sound more convincing were I to say "I'll be back"?)

BI Publisher Discoverer integration

I shall talk a bit about the benefits of the integration between BI Publisher and Discoverer in the 10.1.3.3 release, and how that shall be of interest to people who want to create reports with more adhoc layouts than are possible with Discoverer, among other benefits.

The first: Discoverer
Discoverer is a BI tool used for adhoc querying, analysis, and reporting of data. It can report against relational as well as Oracle OLAP data sources. It has tens of thousands of customers, and it’s a fine product thank you. You can read more about Discoverer on this blog as well as on OTN.
To begin to cut to the chase, there are two primary enhancements that Discoverer customers have been asking for some time (there are more, but I am picking these two):
1. The limited flexibility when it comes to laying out your Discoverer worksheets. You get a title view, a text area view (basically a title view but at the bottom), a graph, and one table or one pivot table (crosstab). And you can position the graph above, below, to the left, or to the right of the table component.

or

or


or

Now, for adhoc analysis and for many other purposes these layouts are adequate. But sometimes people have felt the need to lay out these views in a more flexible manner.

2. You can schedule a Discoverer worksheet (or worksheets). You can view the results of these scheduled worksheets. You can export a scheduled worksheet. You can email a scheduled worksheet (using Discoverer Viewer). What you cannot do is do all of this in a non-interactive manner. i.e. you cannot tell Discoverer to run a worksheet at a specified date and time, export the results into PDF or XLS, etc..., and then email these results via email to designated people.


The Discoverer Scheduling Manager.


My scheduled Discoverer worksheet in Discoverer Viewer.


This is the scheduled Discoverer worksheet in Viewer.

And this is the email page that I can use to email the scheduled Discoverer worksheet to multiple users, as an attachment (XLS, PDF, HTML, etc...)

The second: BI Publisher (formerly known as XML Publisher) BI Publisher is the enterprise reporting and document creation product from Oracle, and now also part of BI EE. Apart from the millions of uses of BI Publisher, the ones that are pertinent to this post are the ability of BI Publisher to let users create highly formatted reports, schedule them, and have them delivered to a variety of destinations, including email, printer, FTP, WebDAV, etc...

The third: Better Together - what happens when you bring Discoverer and BI Publisher together? No... not a third product, but syncretism! In BI EE 10.1.3.2 BI Publisher was enhanced to let it access Answers based data sources to allow users to create pixel-perfect reports. In BI Publisher 10.1.3.3 this functionality has been logically extended to allow Discoverer data sources – specifically worksheets – to act as data sources to BI Publisher. For this purpose, there were enhancements in both Discoverer and BI Publisher. SOAP web services have been added to Discoverer, for the first time, to expose some functionality of Discoverer that can then be called by programs using these web services. BI Publisher was enhanced to let it recognize and handle Discoverer as a data source.

Therefore, now you can take Discoverer worksheets like this:


And build nice looking reports like this:





- all using the wonder of BI Publisher.
These reports can also be scheduled to run and have the content distributed to users via email (other supported destinations include FTP, WebDAV, Printer, etc...).

And you can use the BI Publisher Template Builder for Microsoft Word to format and layout these reports:


That's the real quick introduction to Discoverer and BI Publisher integration.

As an aside, I always find it a bit curious and sort-of-interesting when I see a press release or news story describing a new release as having ‘radically improved functionality’, ‘path-breaking’, and simply so great that you have to upgrade. Of course, every release represents improvement over the previous one, or at least it should (otherwise the engineers, product managers, and QA engineers failed to do their jobs and should be fired -sometimes they get promoted, but that’s another story), so in that sense it is reasonable to expect and reasonable to state that the new release is better than the previous one.
What you really don't want to do is end up in this sort of a situation:


This post attempts to articulate via textual and digital visual aids (aka screenshots) some of the benefits of the loosely coupled integration between BI Publisher and Discoverer that may accrue to users who have a requirement to develop reports with a degree of positional flexibility as it relates to the layout of components usually and typically used for rendering aggregated data in a manner so as to enable and facilitate distribution of the said data thus visualized such that it may be construed to confer functionality greater than that provided by Oracle Discoverer, albeit in a specific context.

Yes – I did that without even using the 'bullshit generator'!

Update: deleted a sentence, and moved the first paragraph from the original post to the bottom.

New poll and results from last poll

I have created a new poll on the BI blog - "What do you think is or are the most important features of BI EE 10.1.3.3?" It's going to be open till the end of next month. Now that BI EE 10.1.3.3 is now available, I wanted to get your feedback on what you think are the most important features to you in this release. You can go to the blog to vote, or you can also use this link to cast your vote.

And here are the results from the last poll - "When will BI EE 10.1.3.3 release?"

More than a third of you thought it would release in Sep, before Sep 15. Less than 1 in 8 thought it would release in the first half of August. Well...

BI EE Upgrade Survey

This is a quick survey to help us get actual feedback on Upgrade data and acceptable timeframes. Data to Be Upgraded 1. What is the size of BI EE/BI Apps System to be upgraded 0 to 50GB 50 to 250GB 250 to 750GB Greater than 750GB Upgrade with Data 2. How much time is acceptable for a upgrade to take (including data) 0 to 2 hrs 2 to 4 hrs 4 to 8 hrs Greater than 8 hrs

10.1.3.3 is now available

BI EE 10.1.3.3.0 is now available for download from OTN, and should also become available on eDelivery very soon. Also releasing with BI EE 10.1.3.3.0 is the standalone version of BI Publisher 10.1.3.3.0 as well as BI Applications version 7.9.3 ("Oracle Business Intelligence Applications").

See my earlier post - Go vote! - now one can quibble whether BI EE 10.1.3.3.0 did in fact release before Aug 14 or not, because it did go RTM on Aug 14, but it takes a few days for it become available on OTN for download. But anyway...

Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.3.0 is the next (semi) major release for BI EE after the release of BI EE 10.1.3.2 that happened in January this year (see posts on 10.1.3.2). BI EE 10.1.3.2.1 released in April (see posts on 10.1.3.2.1), but it was a point release with support for some additional platforms , languages, and some targeted bug fixes. BI Standard Edition One was the other big news in the world of Oracle BI (see posts on BI SE1). While this - 10.1.3.3.0 - is not as big a new release as 10.1.3.2 was, which had more than 200 new features, 10.1.3.3 is still a big enough release to warrant a celebration (or not... depending on which side of the competitive fence you are on). In brief, some of the new features in 10.1.3.3.0 are (and I am reproducing verbatim from the new features doc):

• "Oracle BI Answers-Based Metadata Dictionary Feature"
• "Multi-Select Dashboard Prompts Feature"
• "Office Integration with BI Dashboard Feature"
• "Dashboard Link Types Feature"
• "Import Oracle Catalog Feature"
• "Embedded Database Functions Feature"
• "Drag and Drop XMLA Metadata Objects Feature"

• "Oracle BI Publisher Template Builder Enhancements"
• "Flash Templates for Oracle BI Publisher"
• "Oracle BI Publisher PowerPoint Output"
• "Oracle BI Publisher Integration with Oracle BI Discoverer"
• "Performance Improvements for Oracle BI Publisher"
• "Converting Reports from Oracle Reports to Oracle BI Publisher"
• "Support for Digital Signature in PDF Documents"
• "Support for Postscript Printers"

• "Installing Oracle Business Intelligence for Microsoft Office"
• "Microsoft Office Support"

In particular, I would like to call out attention to these features:

• Microsoft Office Integration: there are snazzy new Excel and PowerPoint Add-ins that access BI Presentation Server based requests, there is the ability to copy and paste BI views from Answers or Dashboards into Office documents, the ability to generate PowerPoint output from Answers views, and support for PowerPoint (.ppt) as an output format for BI Publisher.
• Integration between BI Publisher and Discoverer: which I think every Discoverer customer shall be delighted with, as it brings to Discoverer customers the ability to create hi-fidelity layouts from your existing Discoverer worksheets (relational as well as OLAP), and lots more.
• The ability to create interactive, nice looking, offline capable Flash dashboards using the Flex builder, and populate them with data supplied by BI Publisher. Flash therefore becomes an output format supported by BI Publisher, with all the attendant benefits.
• For those more interested in the server side of things, one feature that you will like is the ability to drag and drop XMLA metadata objects in the Admin Tool.

Some useful links:

• Download the software - home page (the page URL actually says 101320bi :-)
• Download BI EE 10.1.3.3 for Windows, Linux (1.3 GB downloads, and you also get downloads for Solaris - SPARC, HP - Itanium and PA-RISC, and IBM - AIX5L)
• Download BI Publisher 10.1.3.3 (Standalone version) for Windows, Linux (the download sizes vary from 700MB - 950 MB depending on the platform you choose to download for).
• Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Documentation - home page
• Download the doc library for BI EE 10.1.3.3 (19 MB Zip file)
  
• View the doc library for BI EE 10.1.3.3 (HTML Welcome page)
• New Features Guide (HTML or download the PDF)
  
• System Requirements and Supported Platforms (PDF)
  

Oracle Database 11g on Linux now available

For those keeping track, Oracle Database 11g Release 1 (11.1.0.6.0) - Standard Edition, Standard Edition One, and Enterprise Edition - became avialable for download from OTN. You can download it from this link - a 1.7GB single zip file. Also see Keith's previous post - 11g OLAP – Hot Pluggable Performance Booster… and Oracle Extends Its Lead in the DW Platform Tools M...

What no GUI? How to Load AW XML Files

This part of a series of postings prompted by many questions I received about how to manage an analytic workspace without using a GUI (AWM or OWB) . In this post I want to provide some more information on using XML templates. Most of this information came from Marty Gubar, OLAP Product Manager, who is an expert in using AW XML.

Personally, I am still not sure how you would create an XML file for an AW without using Analytic Workspace Manager, however, based on recent posts on the OLAP forum and from questions posted to our internal help mail list, it is obvious there are people actually designing and building AWs without ever using AWM. So I going to make the assumption that you have somehow managed to created your XML file that describes a dimension or a cube, or any other supported object, and question now is how do you load that file into the AW?

The first thing you need to do is to find this extremely useful jar file, called ImportXML.jar file. For the moment you will have to email me (keith.laker@oracle.com) to get a copy of this file, but hopefully the product management team will get it hosted on the OLAP OTN home page very shortly. Once you have this jar file you can create a script file as follows:

java.exe -classpath .\ImportXML.jar samples.awxml.ImportXML %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

The script takes the following arguments

• id/pwd ID and Password
• -con [host:port:sid] Connect string (e.g. localhost:1521:orcl)
• -aw [TargetAW] AW that is the target for the XML input (required when XML does not include a complete AW)
• - file [file] Name of XML file

Examples:
1. Importing an object (e.g. a calculation) into the GLOBAL analytic workspace:

• import scott/tiger -con localhost:1521:orcl -aw global -file my_model.xml

2. Importing an entire analytic workspace:

• import scott/tiger -con localhost:1521:orcl -file global_aw.xml

The above script can be used with the XML template files generated by Analytic Workspace Manager as well. Alternatively you can manually create your own (as some of you are quite clearly doing!). If you are manually creating these files, or just want to modify an existing file to make some changes hopefully the following overviews will help:

Structure of an XML File: Each XML file is broken down into four basic blocks, which relate to the type of work being performed.

• Step 1 is to attach the required AW via an “Attach Id” tag.
• Step 2 is to process the object identified within the file
• Step 3 is to commit all changes
• Step 4 is detach the AW

There is a quick an easy way to understand what is required and how these files are processed. If you use Warehouse Builder, it is possible to use Control Center to generate deployment scripts, which you can then review. For example I used OWB to generate a a CREATE dimension and a DROP dimension script so I could understand the steps involved and review the code it generated. There are a number basic tags that you need to use

• Attach
• Commit
• Delete
  
• Create
  
• Delete
  
• Alter
  
• ActiveObject
  
• Id
  

Hopefully, the following sections will help to explain how to use these various tags:

Attaching an AW
The process for attaching is very simple. There are two ways to do this, you either:

• pass a parameter into your script file via the command line using -AW aw_name
• code the AW and schema name into the XML file
  

I think the first is probably the best idea because it makes it easier to move XML and import files into different database instances. But if you want to hard code this information into your XML file then you need provide the following code:



(I am hoping you can read this code!). The process is quite straightforward. The first four lines are the normal XML header information, after that comes the following:

1. Attach tag with an Id tag that contains an the word Action with a number, like this "Action1" . This controls the order of processing and in an normal XML file you will see this repeated with numbers increasing sequentially through the file
2. ActiveObject tag starts the block to identify what the file is going to process which is determined by the next line
3. In this case the attach needs to process an AW so an AW tag is used to identify the specific AW to be attached
4. The last three rows contain the termination tags for rows 1,2 and 3.

It is possible to define an attach mode within this block as well, allowing the AW to only be attached in read-only mode which allows AWs to be shared across multiple projects and allows an AW to be attached by multiple processes at the same time.

Committing Changes within an AW
The process for committing is the same as the attach process except the tag Commit is used. Because during a session we could in theory have mulitple AWs attached the commit block still requires an ActiveObject block to identify the AW to be updated. This allows to not update other AWs as required.




Detaching an AW
The process for detaching is also the same as the attach process except the tag Detach is used. Because during a session we could in theory have mulitple AWs attached the detach block still requires an ActiveObject block to identify the AW to detach.



Building a CREATE Script
Create scripts are the output from Analytic Workspace Manager. After the main header block you will find a Create tag with an associated Id that defines the action reference for the create statement. If you are using the Attach tag as well, then the number associated with "Action" for the Create block must be greater than that used in the Attach block. It all sounds very complicated but when you see the code it is very simple.

The Create block identifies the create process in full. For a dimension that full process is:

1. Dimension name
2. Dimension labels
3. Dimension attributes
4. Dimension levels
5. Dimension hierarchies
6. Dimension mappings
   

A lot of information needs to be provided in the XML file, which is why I prefer to use Analytic Workspace Manager to generate these!

Building a DELETE Script
Performing a Delete operation in Analytic Workspace Manager is very simple - highlight the object and hit the delete key. Assuming there are no supporting objects that prevent the delete process from running the object will be deleted - for example you cannot delete a dimension while it is still associated with a cube. However, outside of Analytic Workspace Manager the XML file does provide a Delete tag to allow for command line deletion of objects. The amount of information you need to supply to delete an object is minimal. For a dimension it is simply the lines containing the Dimension tag and the end-Dimension tag. The delete process will remove all the objects with dimension automatically.








Building an ALTER Script
It is possible to update certain parts of an AW using this method. To be honest, I have not tried everything. According to the Java documentation this method allows you to update any of the text attributes, such as:

• Long descriptive label
• Short descriptive label
• Plural descriptive label
  

So you could change a dimensions description from "Products" to "Company Products" for example. For more heavy duty alterations, such as modifying a hierarchy by changing the levels within the hierarchy I think you would need to delete the hierarchy first and then rebuild it. It may depend on the types of changes you want to make, however, the API documentation seems to indicate this is a heavily restricted tag. But enjoy!

The BI - EPM Blog

You may have seen the blog comment, if you haven't, here's the really good piece of news: there is a new BI - EPM blog available now at http://blogs.oracle.com/frankbuytendijk/. Here's an introduction from the blog:

Frank Buytendijk, Vice President of Corporate Strategy for Oracle|Hyperion and previously a Gartner Research Vice President, is one of world's most recognized thought leaders on business intelligence (BI) and enterprise performance management (EPM). As a researcher, presenter, and business strategy consultant for Oracle|Hyperion's customers, Buytendijk's style is best described as provocative, out-of-the-box, and future-oriented, while adding a human touch. Based in The Netherlands, Buytendijk brings 20 years of experience in BI & EPM.

You can subscribe to the blog feed here.

Oracle Extends Its Lead in the DW Platform Tools Market

More excellent news for the database team, following hot on the heels of the extremely positive coverage of the 11g database, a new analyst report from IDC has identified Oracle as the leader, by a very big margin, in data warehouse platform tools market. The full story is on the Oracle.com website and can be found here.

This market segment comprises both DW generation and DW management tools. According to IDC, Oracle has over 40% of the market which translated into $1.8 billion in revenue for 2006. So which products were included as part of the platform in this survey? The same group of products that featured heavily in the 11g press releases via comments from Andy Mendelsohn and Charles Rozwat:

• Warehouse Builder
• Partitioning
• OLAP
• Data Mining

all of these products are key to growing Oracle's dominance of the data warehouse market, and from the information released as part of the 11g presentations (see previous posting) these products are adding significant new features that are going to make building and managing an Oracle data warehouse even easier.

Interestingly, IDC sees Oracle as being in an excellent position to exploit new areas such as spatial analytics. In fact, Warehouse Builder 10gR2 can already "spatially enable" an existing schema so there is nothing stopping customers from using spatial features today. The front page of OTN has a link to an article on integrating spatial with Google map:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/lokitz-spatial-geoserver.html

The only problem now is : where to send everyone to get more information? Personally, I always use the Yahoo websites for this type of information so here is the link :

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/070806/aqm088.html?.v=14

Alternatively try typing "Oracle Named Worldwide Market Share Leader in Data Warehouse Platform Tools" into Google and you should get over 150,00 hits.

Russian BI Blog

Doing some clickstream analysis on the BI Blog, I saw some hits coming this way from a site http://oraclebi.ru/

Check the blog out; and in case you don't know Russian, you can try the Google translated site here. It lists Mark Rittman's blog and mine among others.

Post Edit: I got an email from the blog author, Andrey Pivovarov, who is a sales consultant with Oracle, based out of Moscow.

Go vote!

I have added a poll page element on the Oracle BI Blog template. This is a new page element that Blogger provided, and I wanted to sort of kick the tyres around. So, please go to the blog and vote.

Edits: corrected a typo. And added a screenshot - within minutes of posting this post and adding the poll page element my blog showed up with an error message for the poll! It's up and working now; anyway, signing off for the weekend.

11g OLAP – Hot Pluggable Performance Booster…

Over the last few weeks there have been a lot of headlines, articles and blog posts regarding the 11g release of the database. From the point of BI, this release does have a lot to offer. Most importantly (from my point of view) the multi-dimensional model will finally move beyond the current use cases and evolve into a hot a pluggable performance booster. Here is a direct quote from Charles Rozwat, Oracle executive VP for server technologies:

“Oracle's new OLAP features take business intelligence 'from a specialized niche into a much broader market.' “

"As data changes in the base data tables, those changes are automatically refreshed to the materialized views stored in the cubes. The bottom line is more automation and a better ability to handle large amounts of data and complex queries with less of an impact on performance."

Andy Mendelson has also been widely quoted regarding his comments on 11g OLAP:

"The big breakthrough here is that we're able to use the OLAP cubes as a transparent performance accelerator inside the database. The users are still happily using their SQL applications, and they won't even know they're using OLAP. We're moving OLAP from a specialized market to a much broader market among all our SQL users."

The end result is a hot pluggable peformance layer than will help improve response times for all SQL reporting products (Discoverer, BI EE, Business Objects, Cognos etc).

I am glad to see that Googling the term “11g OLAP” provides a number of links analysing 11g OLAP . The first link, at the moment anyway, is to Intelligent Enterprise and their posting provides a non-technical overview of the launch. From this site you jump directly to the second link: the 11g OLAP datasheet on OTN. The datasheet can be downloaded from the OLAP home page on OTN, or you can access it directly via this link here.

The real analysis starts with the next two links from Vlamis and Mark Rittman. Rather than repeat everything here I going to link everyone over to these two postings as together they provide the best analysis of what you can expect from 11g OLAP:

The Vlamis blog, provides a lot more detail on the launch and 11g Analytic Workspace Manager. Chris and Dan have been heavily involved with the beta program and their 11g OLAP posting contains links to the actual 11g launch webcast and links to a powerpoint presentation with screenshots of key 11g Analytic Workspace Manager features. You can get to their web site via this link which will take you directly to the posting on 11g OLAP: http://www.vlamis.com/blog.php/?p=27

Mark's posting looks more at the SQL access layer and the new SQL CUBE_TABLE function as well as reviewing more general features of 11g OLAP. You can access Mark's review at:

http://www.rittmanmead.com/2007/05/07/oracle-olap-11g-news-and-the-vlamis-blog/

For those of you wanting to try 11g OLAP the Linux version will be out in August so watch out for the announcement on OTN.