Sunday 23 September 2012

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

Friday 8 June 2012

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

Saturday 2 June 2012

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

Wednesday 23 May 2012

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

Tuesday 1 May 2012

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

Friday 27 April 2012

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.

Friday 9 March 2012

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.

Thursday 8 March 2012

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

Wednesday 29 February 2012

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

Thursday 23 February 2012

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)

Saturday 18 February 2012

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

Tuesday 14 February 2012

Silenced writeback using webservices - part 2


Happy Valentine's day to all :)

This is the 2nd 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

Saturday 11 February 2012

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

Saturday 14 January 2012

Pivotal performance improvement in OBIEE


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

Friday 6 January 2012

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.