Creating Download Utility using PLSQL

Let me start this article with an apology for not posting an article in such a long time. I have been involved in writing a book and it is eating most of my time so articles will be sparse in the next few months as well. Let’s however cut the negativity and enjoy the fun of creating a download utility using PLSQL

Coding different page layouts in a single rtf template and the importance of Contexts in BI Publisher

The requirement was to generate an output in statement page size or in legal page size, depending on a parameter value. Since the parameter was passed from Siebel and since I did not know the method to conditionally call different rtf files from Siebel so I had to code everything in 1 single rtf file

Sorting outer group based on inner group in BI Publisher

I spent almost a day to implement a grouping and sorting requirement and after all that brain storming I found that the requirement can be implemented by an elementary piece of code. I wish to share this with the rest of the world

Formatting time in BI Publisher

This article describes a mechanism to format time in BI Publisher.

Let me explain with an example

I have a XML file with the following tag in it.

          <SsStartTime>18:00:00</SsStartTime>

The requirement is to display this time as 6:00PM

OBIEE performance improvement tips

My 1st article in this blog was about OBIEE repository tuning and this article is an extension to it.

This article is intended to be a glossary of the things that I feel are important to tune OBIEE output. This article is only intended to give a pointer and an introduction to the things mentioned in it

Please add your comments if you feel that I have missed something. I will update this article if I discover some new tricks

Enough said, lets roll

Using custom transformations in BI Publisher 10G

Out of all my posts on BI publisher, this one is my personal favorite. The article describes a mechanism to use any custom function in BI publisher reports. This opens a whole box of opportunities. The custom functions have to be written in java which means that you can code anything between the sun and the earth and then use it in your BI Publisher reports.

Creating reports in Excel using OBI server

This article describes a mechanism to create reports in excel using the relations established in Oracle BI Server. We can leverage BI server and the relations established in it to create quick reports in excel. The last paragraph of the article talks about using the iqy file to get data with OBIEE's formatting.

SQL developer data modeler for OBIEE developers

I haven’t extensively worked on data modeling but I saw this kool feature of sql developer data modeler. It gives you a relational picture of your warehouse and lists all attributes, enforced constraints, joins, keys etc. It became a lot easier for me to work with the physical layer after using this

Creating Applications in OBIEE using DAD

OBIEE is a great business intelligence tool but it is a one way highway. Users can use OBIEE to see the intelligence in the data but what if users want to put a few things of their own. I am presenting a mechanism to make OBIEE a 2 way highway

Folding table in Oracle using unpivot function

In this post, I am unsing unpivot function to change the arity and cardinality in the result. mXn table is used to get pXq result such that product(m,n) = product(p,q)

Installing SSL enabled APEX 4.1 with development environment and APEX Listener on Weblogic and standalone

This article presents a way to set SSL enabled APEX 4.1 on weblogic using APEX listener. The final part shows the process to configure standalone APEX listener and the use of Grizzly in it.

This post is divided in 4 sections

1. Installing APEX schema and related DB components

2. Installing APEX listener

3. Time to configure the listener

4. APEX Listener in standalone mode

Silenced writeback using webservices - part 2

Happy Valentine's day to all :)

This is the 2^nd part of the series in which I am using webservies to writeback. In my previous article, I showed a mechanism to do writeback using a utility of OC4J. That mechanism works well with OC4J and OAS (Oracle Application Server) but for other webservers we need an independent webservice. In this article, I'm creating an independent webservice and deploying it on weblogic

Silenced writeback using webservices - part 1

This article presents an alternate way to do write back in OBIEE. I call it silenced because this doecs not involve the creation of text boxes to writeback something into the database. The mechanism is helpful if we intend to writeback some info, depending on some action taken by the user and we do not want the user to explicitly write the info in text boxes

Pivotal performance improvement in OBIEE

This article shows a method to improve the performance of the pivot view of OBIEE. 

Freedom to format in OBIEE

I’m finally back to my blogging business J. This article deals with the usual OBIEE business of formatting. OBIEE gives a lot of formatting options by letting us write javascript/HTML code in a spectrum of places such as narrative, static view, text’s in dashboards, data format tab of columns etc.
I am sure you can list a lot more examples of places where we can write javascript/HTML in OBIEE.

Book review - Oracle BI Publisher 11g: A Practical Guide to Enterprise Reporting

Below is a review of Oracle BI Publisher 11g-A Practical Guide to Enterprise Reporting, written by Daniela Bozdoc and published by Packt Publishing. More information about the book can be found at here

Making OBIEE web service friendly

I know that I am obsessed with web services, but this is my final article in the series dealing with web services.

BPEL tasklist in OBIEE and APEX

We have seen the process of creating a BPEL process with human work flows in my previous article. We have also seen the process of shifting a task from the work list of one user to the other.

Now let’s put this now info to use. 

BPEL Human Workflows

Let's talk about Human workflows. I have given an introduction to Human workflows in one of my previous posts and I will like to start from where I had left there.

Bouquet of BI functions

I thought of putting OBIEE, BI Publisher, APEX and BPEL together.

Using BPEL in APEX

BPEL is a tool used to define web services. We can use it to invoke web service of a certain application or tool and then transform the output of this service into something that can be used by the web service of another tool. The web service of the 2^nd tool can then be invoked to get the desired results.

Query to get a character separated list from a result set

I wouldn’t take the credit of this but I found a very cool way of converting an array to a string using hierarchical queries. I found this mechanism in one of my projects and I think it is good enough to be shared

The performance enhancing drug called Table function

Finally a post on APEX :)

I have seen a number of situations in development of both Oracle APEX (Interactive reports) and in Oracle BI Publisher where the developer has to implement complex functionality but he only has the freedom to write SQL statements and not PL SQL logic. Due to this he ends up writing the complex logic using ‘and clause’ and ‘or clause’.

Siebel database (OLTP) blocking

A few days back, I was working on a Siebel application which had the issue of a lot of database blockings and the running tasks frequently reached max tasks.

We took the below steps to pin the problem

Siebel architecture high level overview

Siebel has many components and the one which is extensively used is ecommunications_enu.
The following is a good view of the general architecture of Siebel 

Multiple BI Publisher on a server and its URL change

Building on the concept of changing files in the war (web archive) and hosting multiple applications, we will now try to host multiple BI Publisher applications on the same server. This process of changing files in war package and deploying it has been discussed in the following post

Changing the default URL of OBIEE

We have a limitation that we can only install one OBIEE server and 1 presentation server on a machine

Installing OBIEE on a Solaris box

There are 2 kinds of possible installations

a.       Basic

b.      Advanced

Oracle Business Intelligence Repository Tuning

I am trying to collect the few steps that might help in repository tuning. The benefits of tuning something up the ladder will be less than the benefits of fixing things at the base of the ladder