More on Dates

Do you have timestamp values????

And do you want to......, well join them to a date????

Cast(timestamp_value as DATE)

Does the same as TRUNC(timestamp_value) in Oracle. It removes the time section and you are left with just the date part.

Works in Prompts as well as prompted columns (fortunately).

Which table is selected at runtime

You have many tables under your logical table in OBIEE. Is there any way to guarantee the order in which they are used when multiple paths through the data are available?

Well there is a way to ensure that given tables are ranked lower in the list for selection.

Priority Group

Found on the General Tab of the Logical table source properties.

You can set priority group numbers to determine which logical table source should be used for queries for which there is more than one logical table source that can satisfy the requested set of columns.

For example, you might have a lookup table and another very large table where the data is repeated. Both have the same data, just one has many more rows. Often, scanning a large (many million row table) for distinct values is expensive, while access to a lookup table is “cheap.” In this situation, you can assign a higher priority to the lookup to ensure that all queries are fulfilled using the smaller (more efficient) table if possible.

Note that the priority group of a given logical table source does not always ensure that a particular query will be fulfilled by that source.

Note that the default value for Priority Group is 0 (zero), and changing this value to 1 (one) makes it lower in priority. Zero is therefore highest priority.