Big Data

A fascinating article demonstrating the challenges of Big Data, what it is, and how companies are starting to approache the problem.

"Increasingly large amounts of data are collected and stored but to no discernible advantage. While the data is actually there, the in-house relational database tools are simply not equipped to deal with such a massive amount of data in anything like a realistic time frame. Instead, companies are turning to solutions that combine in-memory computing engines with the distributed parallel processing power of multiple servers."

But the problem as always is what to do with all the data. When you have torrents of data hitting your system, making an intelligent and accurate decisions starts to get challenging. Getting the data to tell the story you want or match your conclusions is easy enough, but letting the data tell the story is the challenge. The bigger challenge is accepting the results.

Some basic string manipulation in OBIEE.

Manipulating strings using SUBSTR

To extract parts of a string of characters like prefixes or file extensions (as an example) we involve a few of the base string functions available in OBIEE.

So what basic features do we need to know about strings, or what basic functionality do we need to manipulate strings.

SUBSTRING

To extract a substring from a string we need to be able to determine several things about the string.
1. Its overall length
2. If a character or sequence of characters is in the string.
3. the start position of a sequence of one or more characters within the string.

So how long is a string?

We can use the LENGTH function to return the number of characters in the string.

We have the LOCATE function to determine the position of a particular string within the string.

Used together they will allow us to extract the second word from the string 'one two three'.

Let's do a worked example

Start a new Analysis and select any column. We will change the contents as we go. Select Edit formula

and edit the column formula to contain 'one two three' (the single quotes are important as they tell OBIEE this is a string).

Add another column and this time we will edit the formula to show the length of the first column. Select the dropdown on the new column and along the bottom of the Column formula panel you will find a column button with a down chevron, click this and select 'one two three'. Highlight 'one two three' then using the f(...) button at the bottom left we will expand the string functions and select LENGTH.

LENGTH('one two three')

Similarly we will now add columns for finding the first occurence of space ' '.

LOCATE(' ', 'one two three')

and another for the next space

LOCATE(' ', 'one two three', LOCATE(' ', 'one two three')+1)
and one to extract the second word, (remember the word starts one character after the first Locate).

SUBSTRING('one two three' FROM LOCATE(' ', 'one two three')+1 FOR (LOCATE(' ', 'one two three', LOCATE(' ', 'one two three')+1)-LOCATE(' ', 'one two three')))

The SUBSTR has the following syntax SUBSTR(string FROM start FOR number). So we can fill in the blanks

• string is obviously 'one two three'
• start is LOCATE(' ', 'one two three')+1
• and number is the length of the word which we can calculate as (the second occurence of space) minus (the first occurence of space + 1)

and finally a test of the length of the second word, just make sure.

LENGTH(SUBSTRING('one two three' FROM LOCATE(' ', 'one two three')+1 FOR (LOCATE(' ', 'one two three', LOCATE(' ', 'one two three')+1)-LOCATE(' ', 'one two three'))))

iTunes e-book

Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Reports and Dashboards Labs

by Antony Heljula

Looks like a cracking read, most stuff by Antony Heljula is :-)

You'll need an iPad with iBooks 2.

Here's the blurb.

"This book is the second in the series and puts the knowledge and skills learned in Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Reports and Dashboards into practise.

This book contains in-depth demonstrations, showing the reader how to design and build sophisticated Interactive Reports and Dashboards using a wide range of exciting features, such as Embedded Maps, Pivot Tables, Graphs, Conditional Formatting and Actions."

available here.

OBIEE Mobile logs

OBIEE 11.1.1 - How to obtain Crash logs for BI Mobile app in iPhone/iPad

a. First synchronize your mobile device (iPhone/iPad) with your computer

b. Crash logs stored under:

•          Windows 7

–        C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\Logs\CrashReporter\MobileDevice\iPad2

•          Windows XP

–        C:\Documents and Settings\Application Data\Apple computer\Logs\CrashReporter\

•          Mac OS X

–        /Library/Logs/CrashReporter/MobileDevice//

Original article here.

OBIEE - Enable evaluate

In the most recent incarnations of OBIEE, when you install, by default all EVALUATE functionality is disabled.

That means that any analysis that uses the evaluate functionality will throw an error like

"[nQSError: 43113] Message returned from OBIS. EVALUATE_SUPPORT_LEVEL inside NQSConfig.INI is not set to support EVALUATE. (HY000)

To enable this again you will need to edit the NQSConfig.ini file in
{MW_HOME}\instances\instance1\config\OracleBIServerComponent\coreapplication_obis1

and edit the EVALUATE_SUPPORT_LEVEL from the zero default to one of the settings allowed.

# EVALUATE_SUPPORT_LEVEL:
# 1: evaluate is supported for users with manageRepositories permssion
# 2: evaluate is supported for any user.
# other: evaluate is not supported if the value is anything else.

EVALUATE_SUPPORT_LEVEL = 2;  

The evaluate functionality is seen a potential security weakness, as it allows the analyses running as abstracted entities to dive right into the database.

OBIEE Graph - Trellis View

There is a new view available in OBIEE 11.1.1.6.2 BP1 - Trellis

This allows us to create the spark graphs (mini inline graphs) that allow us to compress thousands of data points into some fairly digestible graphics.

I've only played with this for a few minutes, but must admit I am impressed. 

Before this you used to have to perform several contortions, invoke the GO URL, .... and now it's available out the box.

Good one.

OBIEE Patch 11.1.1.6.2 BP1

This patchset went in a lot easier than the patch to 11.1.1.6.2.

Opatch threw a couple of warnings, mainly to do with having to 'unpatch' the previous patch before applying the current patch.

Here's a list of patch numbers.

14223977 Patch 11.1.1.6.2 BP1 (1 of 7) Oracle Business Intelligence Installer
14226980 Patch 11.1.1.6.2 BP1 (2 of 7) Oracle Real Time Decisions
13960955 Patch 11.1.1.6.2 BP1 (3 of 7) Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher
14226993 Patch 11.1.1.6.2 BP1 (4 of 7) Oracle Business Intelligence ADF Components
14228505 Patch 11.1.1.6.2 BP1 (5 of 7) Enterprise Performance Management Components Installed from BI Installer 11.1.1.6.x
13867143 Patch 11.1.1.6.2 BP1 (6 of 7) Oracle Business Intelligence
14142868 Patch 11.1.1.6.2 BP1 (7 of 7) Oracle Business Intelligence Platform Client Installers and MapViewer and
13952743 JDeveloper