BI11g - New Features - Custom Groups

BI11g - New Features - Custom Groups

One of the features I was looking forward to in 11g was the enhanced ability of OBI to interpret multi-dimensional data. ; This is the feature that would help welcome the Essbase users, seamlessly into the OBIEE world as well. ; The real world interpretation of data as hierarchies can be easily represented and analyzed in this new version pretty effectively. In this note I will document the neat feature of creating a custom hierarchy in the presentation layer. Yes!! You heard it right, presentation layer. Using the new grouping mechanism you can custom build groups on the fly and use it for analysis.

Before we look into individual features, below is the welcome screen of OBIEE. It is a very unified, intuitive view of actions. You can expect this same user experience from all products including ODI 11g that have adopted Weblogic as its platform. All the products are integrated with the fusion middleware all the more closely integrated providing a seamless integration in likes of functionality, security, manageability or user experience.

You will see all recently accessed objects are already listed for convenience. Also towards the left of the screen all most likely actions that the user may carry out is listed as well.

The actions can be accessed via the quick access bar or the menu. Again you will see the layout of the menu itself. Actions are grouped together to provide a better UI.

Now that you have decided you are going to create an answers request, the next logical step is to select the Subject area on which to base the request. This is the next menu item that comes up for your input.

This is the Answers creation screen. Again the options like results and prompts are visible as tabs.

Here we see a predefined Hierarchy that is created at design time ie at the repository level.

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Note the difference in the Pivot table that is been created. It truly represents a multi dimensionality of the incoming data which was not the case in the previous versions. Now that we have created a very simple request, we will proceed to create our own hierarchy.

We will create a custom group called "My Products" and included a set of members from the available set of values from the Products hierarchy

Now you see a new group with its corresponding fact values.

For users who have been working in Smartview, this feature to switch the rows into columns would really make them feel at home.