So, one of the questions I constantly get when teaching, talking, or raving about the integration between Hyperion Essbase and Oracle BI (specifically 11g), aside from the native hierarchy drill-down capability, of course, is can a user drill down to level 0 or drill all the way back up from whence they drilled-down?  They then proceed to talk about how other native Hyperion tools such as Brio, Production Reporting, and the Essbase Excel add-in can clearly achieve this operation with ease.  An example of this would be “expand all levels” or “drill to level 0″.  I of course, must tell them that right now OBI 11g does not have that as a specific feature but it is slated as a future release.  Ideally, I would like to believe that Oracle has this slated for the very next release, though I have not heard anything about that around the campfire.

Why do I believe this functionality will be in the next release?  I’m glad you asked.  If you open the AdminTool for OBI 11g and right click on a subject area (Presentation Layer) you will see a new option called “Generate Drill Graph”.

Unfortunately clicking on this option gives you a rather vague prompt message that doesn’t tell you much of anything.

But if you search in the RPD help menu for this menu option you will see the following text:

“The Drill To Levels and Drill From Levels tabs are reserved for a future release and are not currently used. An additional option called Generate Drill Graph, available as a right-click option for any Presentation layer object, is also reserved for a future release.”

If you right-click > properties on any hierarchy column in the presentation layer you will see that there are two tabs related to drilling: drill-to and drill-from.  The drill-to column is where I suspect this capability will eventually reside.  Right now it seems more like a place holder.  The drill-from simply lists out the level drilling capabilities that are defined in the Business Model dimension levels.

Based on the statement from the Oracle RPD help menu, I hope that this logic does come to exist as it is asked for by a lot of folks.  On top of that I would like to really see that dynamic Web 2.0 functionality in the tool so that it is hands-down the winner of all BI Analytical and Ad-hoc analysis tools on the market.  Cheers to that.

Oracle BI folks correct me if I am wrong.  Or, leave a comment letting us know which release this will be revealed in.

References:

• OBI 11g RPD Help

Oracle Business Intelligence 11g has finally gotten going with a whirlwind release tour that started in early April 2010.  Today’s launch party takes place in one of the largest business cities in world, New York, NY USA.

After much beta testing, and hush-hush, behind the doors secrecy, this clandestine tool can now be seen via a myriad of marketing paraphernalia online as presented by Oracle.  There are a lot of great resources, break-out session videos, keynotes, etc provided on the Oracle site.  One of my favorites is a side link at http://ht.ly/2bADM which provides some great webcasts on the topic.

Get ready to see some great in-depth detail  on ArtOfBI.com.  We are stoked about the EPM/BI integration that now doesn’t have the limitations that 10g had.  Everything is better in this version as one could only expect from the amount of delay and anticipation this release has brought upon the Oracle BI communities.  We are looking forward to sharing more detail on the topic.

Take a look at some heads up resources from Oracle, et al.  I think you’ll find most of the initial collateral most exciting.

• http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/143363
• http://www.oracle.com/oms/businessintelligence11g/index.html
• http://www.oracle.com/oms/businessintelligence11g/business-insight-075567.html (Demo Videos)
• http://blogs.oracle.com/robreynolds/2010/07/reminder_obiee_11g_north_ameri.html
• BICG Twitter Live from OBIEE 11g Launch