BI review & help

Note: In order to understand and implement this you need to know how to add JavaScript to OBIEE. I strongly suggest you to read my older posts about OBIEE manipulation. this feature has been tested on version 10.1.3.4

I've been asked how to create radio-buttons prompt in OBIEE dashboards. The purpose of this is to make the dashboard more beautiful, becasue radio buttons looks better than drop down list (aka ddl). Another nice thing you can do with this is to add description to every option (as I hope to implement in the near future). So, this is how you'll do it:

• In the OBIEE Administration application, I have a session variable called MyProjectWorkingMode (replace MyProject with your project name). This variable controls the mode (or whatever) of the user (let's say it can be red, green or blue). The default value for this variable is red. This variable is important for us because we'll use it to "remember" what the user selected.
• In OBIEE Answers, I created a dashboard prompt which is a drop-down-list. This prompt has the same default value as the variable (red, in our example) and it sets our variable. important: the caption of this prompt must be MyProjectWorkingMode.
• In order for us (or the JS code) to know in which mode we are we'll create a report called MyProjectCurrentWorkingMode. Put there one column which will show our variable's value and one column from the presentation layer (all reports must go to the underlying DB). The expression in the first column will be ValueOf(NQ_SESSION.MyProjectWorkingMode). In the results tab, create a narrative view which will have a div with the id="MyProjectWorkingModeDiv" and inside it write @1. This will give us the current working mode inside the div. In the compound view, make that the report will only contain the narrative view. Save the report.
• Create a new dashboard page. Add Text object and inside it put the javascript code from the file attached to this post and replace anywhere the "MyProjectWorkingMode" with the name you entered. Make sure the name is the same as in the prompt's caption and the div. Don't forget to mark the "contains HTML markup" checkbox. Add the report we created in the previous step in a seperate Section and hide that section (Properties -> Format Section -> Use Custom CSS style = display:none). Add the dashboard prompt.
• That's it. If you did everything right, the JS code will make the ddl as radio buttons.

I suggest that you'll get over the JS code in the file attached in order to understand what I did. That will let you change the implementation if something is not as you wanted.

Last thing: Before you ask me why it doesn't work in your application, make sure you did everything right and that you have the same version as mine. If it still refuse to work, ask for help from a web/JS developer who can debug the code and see what failed. In my previous posts my features didn't work for some and they thought that this ain't working, where it worked for a lot of people who thanked me.

Enjoy.

No-one in my organization knew what is the difference between stop and abort in the Informatica Workflow Monitor. I googled it, and here is the answer in short term: Abort is killing the process in the underlying operating system, meaning that the memory that the session took for itself won't be released. Most of the OS don't have good-enough garbage collectors, meaning that this memory allocation won't be free until you'll restart the whole server(!). The stop command will ask the session to quit whenever it can, meaning that this will take more time.

Use the abort command only if you must stop the session right now. If you see that over time your informatica server goes slower and slower, restart the server in the weekend.

You can see the full answer here.

This is the fifth and last post regarding Itay Braun's seminar in the SQL & BI conference. In this post, I'll write some notes I collected from the last part of the seminar which discussed SSRS. As you can see, most of the tips are relevent for every reporting tool.

• Scale-Out instead of Scale-In. Meaning that it's better to have multiple SSRS servers on one DB then bigger and better single SSRS server.
• One report should not return all the data. Define and build your report to answer specific answer.
• Use subscriptions. Minimile impact on performance.
• Use cache executions or at least snapshots.
• Visualization (see also my post about dashboard design)
  • Use same colors for for the same business units
  • Use images for better data recognition (e.g countries' flags)
• Monitor the SSRS server. Look at the trace logs, the execution log and the performance counters. You can use Scrubs(free SSRS performance reports).