10 principles of good design:

Back in the early 1980s, Dieter Rams (an industrial designer) was becoming increasingly concerned by the state of the world around him — ‘an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.’ Aware that he was a significant contributor to that world, he asked himself an important question: is my design good design?” In response to this question, he developed the following 10 principles of good design:

Good design is innovative.
The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.
Good design makes a product useful.
A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasises the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.
Good design is aesthetic.
The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products we use every day affect our person and our well-being. But only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
Good design makes a product understandable.
It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product talk. At best, it is self-explanatory.
Good design is unobtrusive.
Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.
Good design is honest.
It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.
Good design is long-lasting.
It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years — even in today’s throwaway society.
Good design is thorough, down to the last detail.
Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.
Good design is environmentally-friendly.
Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimises physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.
Good design is as little design as possible.
Less, but better — because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

Found in an article by Stephen Few from Visual Business Intelligence - really worth spreading around.

Can you honestly say that what you do addresses any of the points above?

See, Even Other People do it.

Catch a glimpse of the video here.

Ignoring that fact that OBIEE is not mentioned, this covers the general theory behind designing for data extraction. All the main idea are covered from extraction to start schemas.

A nice touch is the chalk board, so old school that no batteries are required.

Cool vendors - Gartner

Gartner Cool Vendors 2012

Gartner have identified the next, new way to group and evaluate BI vendors. This is probably on the money, those of us who move on the leading edge of what is available and want more. We recognize the direction BI is moving, the way data will be analysed, and how mashing up of data is now within the reach of the end users (well nearly).

According to them:
"Cool Vendors in 2012 exist on a backdrop of what Gartner terms the nexus of four IT forces – cloud, social, mobile, and information. Those forces, along with the continued impact of consumerization, have essentially set the stage for the next generation of capabilities"

Read more here.

OBIEE - Using LocateN

So I guess your pulling your hair out about now, LocateN doesn't seem to work.

Quick tip:

Replace the LocateN with Locate, that's right remove the N (but keep the syntax). The Locate function appears to be overloaded to allow this functionality and the LocateN (which doesn't work) seems to be a leftover hanging around.

Locate(' ','one two three')

finds the first space ' ' in the string 'one two three', and here's the hidden part, starting from position 0 (zero).

LocateN(' ','one two three',5)

finds the first space ' ' in the string 'one two three' from position 5.