Those tricky developers at Oracle have provided the masses with a beautiful front-end interface for OBI 11g.  They even answered the call for provided native, intuitive drill-down functionality right there in the GUI.  I only have positive things to say about it after working with OBI 11g since during the Beta release. Ahhhhhh!

At a high-level, a hierarchical column is created from a logic dimension’s logic hierarchy.  Clearly you can have more than one logical hierarchy under one logical dimension which means you could have more than one hierarchical column.  A hierarchical column is only called by that name once it resides in the presentation layer (ultimately the Subject Area, right?).  So, by dragging over a logical hierarchy (at any level, but I won’t go into that now) into a Subject Area’s Presentation Table, a Presentation Hierarchical Column is created.  Ok.  So, the end-users from the front-end GUI actually seen a new icon in their Analysis Subject Area selection list which differs from the Presentation Column icons they are used to seeing.

This blog post is just about one gotcha that may or may not catch a few metadata developers when attempting to leverage the new hierarchical columns when developing in the RPD.   This has to do with the fact that for any level in a level-based hierarchy, the key column representing the level, must also be represented in the Presentation Layer (Subject Area) in order for that hierarchy level to be visible in the Subject Area.

Here is an illustrated example using the SampleApp repository that comes from Oracle.  I’ll let you do the testing for yourself.
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Searching for some answers to an OBIEE issue a client was having led me through an extremely detailed excursion through the OracleBI andOracleBIData file system folder structures.  I bumped into the folder /OracleBI/Corda50/ which I hadn’t paid much attention to in the past.  This is where things got interesting.  Spelunking through that directory led me to http://www.corda.com, which low and behold is the owner of the PopChart software technology that OBIEE uses to render its charting graphics – all formats of all charts and graphs.

This PopChart technology is the core reason we have the seemingly superfluous Oracle BI Java Host service that we have all come to love/hate.  It is Java based and clearly fits directly into OBIEE’s infrastructure model.  Okay, so now that you now have that tid-bit in your arsenal, here are few questions that one could ask of their dev skills or conjecturing minds:

1. Why do the charts that PopChart show on their website look cooler than what OBIEE offers?  Could one download a trial, rip the new PopChart version binaries, and swap them in the /Corda50/ folder?
2. Why didn’t Oracle throw in the cool Corda mapping chart?  It would beat MapViewer any day.
3. Is PopChart the engine that we should expect to run graphs/charts in OBIEE 11G?
4. What licensing deal did Oracle set-up to get Corda PopChart in OBIEE?  It had to be a sweet deal for Corda.

Next up in the third party tool battery is a tool that Oracle BI leverages in a more ancillary fashion, SQLAnywhere.  If you haven’t heard of it before don’t worry, there’s only 10 Million or so copies in use  : ) .  SQLAnywhere is owned by Sybase. And as far as I know, even though Sybase had a stellar year in 2008 they have not yet been acquired by an larger firm like let’s say…Oracle.  Although Oracle did have Sybase on their acquisition list back in 2004 during the PeopleSoft takeover helmed by a younger Ellison.

For those of us that have actually completed a Oracle BI Disconnected Analytics implementation you will immediately know (well, you should) that SQLAnywhere is the database for disconnected analytics.  When installing Disconnected Anlaytics as part of a client tools install you get a folder within the OracleBI folder structure called SQLAnywhere.  I eventually plan on doing a Disconnected Analytics Tutorial just to show how it works from a client’s laptop, using Briefing Books, connecting to a local dashboard, etc in a later post.  BTW, SQLAnywhere looks for a “.db” extension for its database file. Without the .db file there is nothing in that default folder to query.

Conclusion

This post is about more that just rambling tid-bits.  It seeks to gain insight into the inner workings of OBIEE.  Let’s face the facts, the cost per license seat for Corda PopChart and SQLAnywhere are not cheap.  You can look it up yourself.   What’s more interesting is Oracle’s no to long ago purchase of Sun Microsystems who had purchased MySQL not to long before that.  Will MySQL replace Oracle BI’s use of SQLAnywhere?  I belive so.  MySQL is much more widely adopted and it is still open-source.  And, what about Corda PopChart?  We’ll soon see who gets the chart and graphs rendering job in Oracle BI 11G but I suspect that it won’t be Corda.  Why my suspicion? Just look at the screenshots from the upcoming 11G Answers preview and look at the Corda PopCharts website, if they did get the gig, they must have done some custom work which I would have brought in-house if I was Oracle BI development management.  Plus, there are some nice open source graphing tools out there, just do a Google search to find them.

All in all I think 11G will make us re-think what we know about OBIEE.  It is going to give us bloggers a lot more content to write about that’s for sure.

Credits

Screenshot for OBIEE 11G

• http://debaatobiee.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/obiee-11g-a-gospel-about-whirlpool-in-bi-space/

In previous, blog posts I’ve talked about the power of Smartview, how it came from Hyperion, and all of that jazz, but today we want to learn how to immediately integrate Smartview and OBIEE.  The burning question is, How can the end-users download smartview to their workstations? We’ll if you’d like to see the option to download Smartview in the “More Products…” menu along with the Oracle BI for Office add-in download, then continue on, you’ll be delighted you did.

Here is what we want the users to see.

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