Sep 8, 2010
Replacing strings in Oracle BI Publisher reports
Oracle BI publisher works awfully bad with Answers type of datasource in at least two points:
column names are created by answers formulas instead of column names, so if you have long formulae, it’ll be shortened to some 128 chars.
Sep 2, 2010
Configuring Ms SQL databases for Cognos Enterprise Planning
I usually use simple recovery mode in Ms SQL installations because:
application databases become inconsistent during administration tasks so having a backup of database in a middle of GTP crash doesn’t give you anything, you’ll have to roll back to GTP start time.
Aug 27, 2010
Pivot Tables and temp files in Oracle BI EE
Pivot tables Pivot tables are by far most used data view in Oracle BI Answers, since they provide ‘multidimensional’ analysis capabilities, aka dimension drag&drop, filtering and some basic calculations.
From server-side view: this component provides worst performance, since all future ‘cube’ data has to loaded into BI server, aggregations and formulas calculated and transformed to internal format.
Jul 19, 2010
Essbase ODBC configuration on Solaris
Using this blog as offline memory. Just ignore this post, if you’re not up to Essbase )
If you’re configuring DataDirect ODBC drivers on *nix system, be aware of following:
May 19, 2010
BI system metadata impact analysis and what BI system APIs are for
“Okay, this column in our BI metadata was supposed to be named Sales, not Sals.
But when we change it, what will happen to the reports that were created, using this name?
May 11, 2010
Freebase GridWorks — a data-driven approach to ETL
Take 5 minutes to watch screencast for FreeBase Gridworks — an interesting new approach to data transformation. Instead of ‘transformation-based’ approach of every tool on the market, this tool uses ‘data-based’ approach, which looks rather intriguing.
Apr 27, 2010
TM1 hint – TurboIntegrator Local Variables
TM1 TurboIntegrator (TI) is truly a highly customizable tool :) I recently needed to be able to pass cube view names as a parameter for export process and it turned out to be really easy.
Apr 25, 2010
Multidimensional reporting functions in Cognos and Oracle
As many of you already know I have a mixed attitude to Cognos BI DMRs (dimensionally modeled relational source) models:
performance is allways a consideration, full-table scans are unpredictable there’s always ‘local processing’ vs ‘database only and some things not working’ dilemma using multidimensional functions in reports is oh-so-hard to debug when they don’t work in complex situations.
Apr 13, 2010
Connecting BI system to Active Directory. Oracle BI vs IBM Cognos BI. Scripts to extract Active Directory information.
I consider Single Sign-On setup through Active Directory(AD) a key point in every system’s life. Up to this point — it’s just a PoC, a prototype or a department (10-20 users) level application.
Apr 6, 2010
Setting up ODI file-CDC capabilities
How to set up a trick called ‘put a file in a folder and it’ll dissappear in DWH’ with Oracle Data Integrator.
Imagine that we need to upload a text file in DWH whenever it appears in some folder with no defined schedule.