As well as giving us
hierarchical columns and a
revamped user interface,
OBIEE 11g comes with a number of improvements and enhancements to
graphs and dashboards. In this posting, I’ll be taking a look at some of
these new features, including:
- An updated graphing engine, new graph formatting tools and the introduction of the slider control
- Master-detail linking of visualizations
- New dashboard prompts
There’s also a new, built-in mapping capability that I’ll cover in a
later posting, together with a full scorecarding application that I will
be looking at tomorrow. For now though, let’s create a new request and
add a simple bar chart view to it.
Notice a few changes in the UI. There’s still the same set of graphs
(so new graphs types, at least that I can see), but we’ve now got
Map
on the list, and all the graphs have little icons to show you how they
will look. Views, a feature of Answers that a lot of first-timers find
confusing, now have their own panel with clear buttons for creating,
editing and deleting them. There’s alos a consistent set of buttons at
the top of the screen for exporting to Excel, searching, creating
groups, previewing in a dashboard and so on.
I create my bar chart and take a look at the controls for fine-tuning
the view. Looking at the graph itself first of all, there’s a new
(SVG?) rendering engine replacing the old Flash-based engine used in
10g, which means that in theory it should work on iPads and iPhones as
well. Best of all, the same graphing engine is shared with Oracle Fusion
Middleware 11g (so you can create your own apps with the same look and
feel as OBIEE 11g), and with BI Publisher 11g, so there’s consistency
between reports created with these two applications.
Under the graph is a collapsable area for setting the graph layout.
Something I was impressed with is the consistency in this layout editor
between all the various views, so that you can for, example, exclude
columns from the view, or add sections or pages, across all views
including simple tabular ones.
Notice the
Display as Slider? checkbox in the
Sections
area? This is common across most of the view types and allows you to
replace section breaks with a slider, which you can move manually or
play, like a video control.
I’m sure Stephen Few will be metaphorically turning in his grave, but
seeing as most OBIEE projects I’ve worked on seem to get judged on the
amount of eye-candy on the screen, this’ll be an interesting novelty to
use for a while, and it could be useful for time-series reports.
Another new feature is Master-Detail linking. This allows you to set
up views within an analysis that respond to values being clicked on in
other views. To take an example, I want to create an analysis that lists
out the product categories that we sell, and when you click on a
category it shows a graph that displays profit margin for each product
within the category.
I start by creating a new analysis, and select the Product Category
and Product Name attribute columns, along with the Profit Margin
measure. Then, in order to turn on master-detail linking, I select
Column Properties for the Product Category column from the criteria view.
Then, using the
Interactions tab in the
Column Properties dialog, I set the Primary Interaction for this column to
Send Master-Detail Events, and type in an arbitrary value for the
Specify Channel setting. This is so that individual views can choose which master-detail events to respond to.
I then save this view, and create the bar chart graph. Then, I edit
the properties for the graph and tell it to respond to these events.
Now, when I show both views in the compound layout, clicking on a product category filters the graph by this value.
Now there’s a lot of new features around visualization in this
release that I’ll have to wait until GA to go into in more detail, but
one other nice addition is an enhanced set of dashboard prompt controls.
In the 10g release we could use drop-down menus, text boxes, date
pickers and multi-select controls to pass parameters to dashboard
requests, but in 11g this has been expanded to include radio buttons and
list boxes (reminding me of
QlikView):
together with drop-downs with checkboxes, and checkboxes on their own.
So there you have it. Tomorrow, to round the week off, we’ll finish
by taking a look at KPIs and the new Oracle Scorecard and Strategy
Management application.
Give
a name to the database and select ODBC Basic from the Database drop
down.Check in the option Allow direct database requests by default.
Please follow the below screenshot.
Click on Connection Pools tab and then click on Add(+) to create a connection pool for the database
Give the name for the connection pool(In my case i have given the name
as PurgeCache) and set the values as per your requirement.
Click on OK then click on Check Out
