At this point most customers and developers of Oracle software know that their evaluation and purchased software can be downloaded from edelivery.oracle.com.  I am giving away no secrets with that statement.  One signs-in to the Oracle portal, accepts a few legal assertions, uses the dropdowns to select the specific software series and OS version and they are in a position to download the software.  At this stage most people, even experience Oracle software officianados, begin downloading the zipped binaries and expect all to go swimmingly.  One consideration that is easily and often overlooked is the “digest” which provides the MD5 and AE5 checksum information for each file (zip, tar, 7z, etc.) that one is actually downloading. If you don’t know what I’m talking about then you must keep reading as you are about to learn something that will prevent you from looking like a newb and wasting hours of your time.

This blog post takes a quick look at describing what the heck the “digest” is and how to verify these checksums in the most common operating systems such as Linux and Windows.

Pay Attention

What many people don’t pay attention to is the view digest page when they begin their downloads.  They assume that once the download is complete everything will be okay.  But what happens if someone downloads a file and a hiccup in the download is a bit lossy or an administrator downloads some files on Linux and FTP’s them to a Windows OS box using the wrong transfer protocol, etc.?  How would you know if something is right or wrong?  Most people, if something isn’t starkly obvious, like a file size of 0KB, will never know until something “breaks” that something is wrong. And, after 4+ hours of thinking it is just them using the wrong zip decompression tool they will eventually redirect the blame and several hours after that another attempt to download will take place.  That is a reactive approach and doesn’t have any place in a proactive agile approach to being a kick-ass techie.    So, How would you know if something is right or wrong?  The smart thing to do is just to run a comparison digest immediately after downloading the set of files that you need for your implementation.  It’s that simple.

On Oracle’s edelivery site be sure to click the “View Digest” button as seen in the image below to open a new window which provides all the hash/checksums for the files in the section you are downloading.

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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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You just have to love Oracle Business Intelligence and the enhancements over OBI 10g.  Again, my recommendation is to get OBI 11g in your org as soon as possible.  At a minimum a dev environment just so you can check out the cool features like the one this blog post talks about, data type sensitive prompts.

What exactly are we talking about here?  We are talking about intelligent object creation assistance.  Instead of just the typical, kludgy, “show all” functionality you see in some other tools when developing a dashboard, report, etc. in OBI 11g presentation services, the OBI 11g interface can intelligently provide you with options related to the context in which you are developing.  Let’s take for example the development of a simple dashboard prompt.  In this post I will seek to provide a quick tutorial “slash” illustration of this concept of context sensitive object creation.  I am using the SampleApp that can be downloaded from Oracle’s BI website download page.

First Example – Calendar Prompt via Date/TimeStamp Data Type

1. Login to the OBI 11g Portal
2. Choose to create a New > Dashboard Prompt
   
3. Select Sample Sales as the Subject Area
   
4. On the Dashboard Prompt creation page click the plus icon to expose the add prompt type list
5. Select “Column Prompt…”
   
6. From the Subject Area column selector prompt choose Time > T00 Calendar Date
   
7. When prompted make sure the User Input drop-down box has the Calendar option selected
   
8. Click OK
9. The prompt is now ready to previewed down in the bottom section.  Click on the calendar icon next to the empty field.
   
10. Viola! A beautiful calendar is present showing OBI 11g’s Web 2.0 functionality for date/timestamp data types.
    

Second Example – Slider Prompt via INT Data Type

1. Continuing from the first example, use the plus icon to expose the add prompt type list to create a second prompt.
2. Select “Column Prompt…”
3. From the Subject Area column selector prompt choose Base Facts > 1-Revenue
   
4. Click OK
5. In the New Prompt window, expand the User Input drop-down box and select Slider as the option
   
6. The New Prompt window will change shape to show additional options based on the selected user input context.  In the Lower Limit field input 1000000 (one million).  In the Upper Limit field input 10000000 (ten million).
   
7. Click OK
8. Viola! Again, another beautiful web 2.0 prompt is shown in the bottom section of the window showcasing the slider prompt.  This prompt can be used to predicate results to fall within a specific metric (Revenue) range while providing the user with an intuitive analytics experience.
   

Conclusion

In OBI 11g, clearly Oracle has done a great job with several of the front-end functional pieces of the application.  This is only the first release of OBI 11g and we are only 5 months in to the GA of the tool.  With the expected release of the R1 patch to enhance and fix several R1 bugs, with some customer feedback I think we all should be optimistic at what lies ahead for Oracle in the Business Intelligence space.