This demo uses Windows 2008 server to show you the creation of service that can automatically call the startserver.bat file which is used for instantiating the DAC server manually.

Location of DAC Server startserver bat file: D:\orahome\10gR3_1\bifoundation\dac

Now create a task inside task scheduler. Type task scheduler in your start menu search and it will show up. Double click the Task Scheduler program that showed up.

Once the Task Scheduler program opens up, Click on ‘Create Task’ in the Actions pane. See the arrow below.

In the new window that opens up, give the task a name like “StartDACserver” and see that it starts using highest privileges available. Even better, set up a seperate system account to start this service. Also make sure this starts as the wintel server boots up i.e. as a startup service.

Click on Triggers tab and click on New button.

In the new window that opened up, choose the trigger as ‘At startup’ from the dropdown.

In the Actions tab, choose action as ‘Start a Program’ and Program/Script as the batch file. Also, choose the Start in and fill that with the batch script location as identified. Though the start up is optional, fill that with the location of your batch file otherwise you would receive errors. Credits to DannyBGood for his suggestions here (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winservermanager/thread/46a867a0-8432-4b90-abe3-9a5661d1b276/)

Choose the options under Conditions tab and Settings tab per your requirements.

Once this is done, you are good to go and DAC Server will start up as the Wintel server starts up.

Look at the event viewer to see whether the task has restarted successfully. If you ever need to edit/delete the task, go to Task Scheduler main screen and go to ‘Active Tasks’ screen as shown here. Highlight the task and double click on the options, you get the options to edit/delete the task.

Once you start developing online changes to your rpd in OBIEE 11g, you most probably already started to think that it would be nice to restart the opmn process to keep everything clean. Back in 10g, we used to do this quite often when we make changes.. remember those good old days or shall we say way toohard development days.

Now, this constant clean and restart of opmn process which triggers the restart of our obiee services like biserver, bipresentation, biclustercontroller, bischeduler and so on.. to see what what gets restarted and see the status of your services, we always use opmnctl status command.

Output of sample opmnctl status command

When the server is restarted, you get this crazy error saying that the path has been changed and you dont have access to the dashboard layout as shown below

When looked into the presentation services diagnostics, this is what you will find out

Now, follow the steps as mentioned below but also review the steps mentioned in this oracle link

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E21764_01/core.1111/e10105/testprod.htm#ASADM11642

1. Make changes to instanceconfig.xml file
2. Make changes to nqsconfig.ini file
3. Restart the opmn process using opmnctl stop and then opmnctl start. Remember that these following steps should be executed from command line not from Enterprise Manager.
4. Remember when this is done, presentation services will not come alive when opmnctl status is executed
5. Revert your changes in the file mentioned in step 2
6. Restart your opmn process as in step 3
7. Revert your changes in the file mentioned in step 1
8. Restart your opmn process as in step 3
9. Now, chances are your presentation services will fail. But, go into Enterprise Manager and start the presentation services. It works with a restart.

Click on restart button highlighted in yellow.

10. Look into the presentation services log and observe that the guids have actually reverted to old guids.
11. Log into analytics website and you are back in business.

Following these steps would be nice. But what would be even more productive is automate this using shell scripts or windows scripts depending on your server os.

Rate this article if found useful.

Until next time, ciao

New Release 7.9.6.3
Compatible with OBIEE 11.1.1.3 or 11.1.1.5.. Dont know .. Wait for the details..

Any changes in the OBIA data model? Not sure.. lets wait for the official release..

A big win for OBIEE 11g enthusiasts.. Kudos to Oracle for this release.

Here is the preview what we can expect later this week

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/392802

Some of the questions that were popped up to me

How do you set the logging level to a group of users?

Why did you set the Administrator logging level to 3 or 7 compared to 2 or 1?

Does OBIEE 10g support multiple rpds at the same time? What type of architectures support this ?

Why was Weblogic introduced as a layer in OBIEE 11g? Scalability, performance advantages gained out of it?

How easy is it to support multiple rpds at the same time in 11g? Is there a simple migration path from 10g to 11g if we are hosting multiple rpds already in 10g?

What type of integrations have been done in your environment between OBI Applications in OBIEE 10g platform and custom data warehouse and reports in OBIEE 11g platform? What do you think about these kind of integrations?

Do you think the security architecture in OBIEE suit enterprise environments? What components involve the OBIEE security architecture?

How easy is it to understand the logic behind converting logical sql into physical sql in OBIEE? Have you developed any tools that convert the OBIEE generated ANSI physical sql to DB specific sql?

Yes… I just clicked my restart blogging button. Until next time, keep building new actionable intelligent BI processes

You will be really amazed at the number of bugs we discover around dates either in Oracle products and the latest Oracle BI product, OBBIEE. Amazingly enough, there are great folks who also volunteer to find out workarounds before Oracle fixes it with a patch or a release.

Let me ask you a question in OBIEE at the presentation layer (lets use 10g version). What if you have two columns (both numeric fields or lets say currency fields stored as numbers) and you want to sum them up?

Do you really know the answer? Think twice. You might say Yes but later you uncover that null value in one field leads to the sum field to be also null even when there is a value in the second field.

This is not a bug but rather you got to understand the OBIEE functionality. How did you fix this ? By adding a IFNULL condition for both the currency fields to check for null and if null, assign 0 as value.

Its all good now.

Similarly, think about what happens when you have a date field in the database and you want to display it in the presentation layer. You just want to bring the field as is through a logical field in the rpd defined as varchar.

What do you think will happen in this case? Well, all characters in the date field are characters and we should be able to display them easily. Think again

I recently encountered this error when I was trying to display a date field in my reports.
The error reads like this:

Error Codes: OPR4ONWY:U9IM8TAC:OI2DL65P
State: HY000. Code: 10058. [NQODBC] [SQL_STATE: HY000] [nQSError: 10058] A general error has occurred. [nQSError: 46035] Datatype(TIMESTAMP) nullable(1) unicode(1) external char(0) conversion to datatype(VARCHAR) nullable(1) unicode(0) external char(0) is not supported. (HY000)

Does this error give you any good information. Indeed, it does but you have to carefully look for it. We are trying to display a date field and internally date is converted to a timestamp field in OBIEE and that is where we have the problem. Date field in the database is brought into the rpd as timestamp and we are trying to store that value in a varchar field.

How did we fix this? In your presentation layer, use the function for the date column and cast the column as a date like CAST(col1 as DATE). This should fix your issue. But, to prevent everyone spending hours trying to research this error, change the column in the rpd with this CAST function being applied and this will apply across all the presentation folders where we are using this column.

Until next time, kudos to all OBIEE evangelists out there trying to make this product better and valuable.

Hope you did go through part1 of OBIEE Interview Questions. Lets dive into Part2 now.

53. What are parameterized nested loop joins (PNLP)? Where are they used? Can you configure a PNLP in your physical or logical layer?

54. You are running a dashboard report and check whether it is using cache? What are the different caches that can be used to serve its customer faster? (remember we are not talking about cache in BI Server only) How does a dashboard request gets served from all available caches?

55. Is it better to cache a fact table or dimension table or both in the BI Server level? Why? (Forget other caches from above question)

56. You recently changed the columns of your presentation catalog as your manager wants to enforce naming standards for all customer facing apps. What happens to all the dashboard requests written prior ot this change? Do they function properly or do they appear broken? If ‘Yes, they will function’ How does they work? ‘If Not, reports appears broken’ what can you do to fix this?  Give examples.

57. What are the different hierarchy types available in OBIEE? When would you use them?

58. How do you create radio buttons on your OBIEE dashboard?

59. Can you create a Master Detail Report in OBIEE and how would you do it?

60. How do you deal with a situation like this when data is coming from a snowflaked data warehouse.

Fact  >—— Dimenion 1 >———-< Dimension 2 >————< Dimension 3

Dimension 1 and Dimension 2 is a M:M relationship and the same for Dimension 2 and Dimension3.

61. How do you resolve a M:M relationship other than using a bridge table?

62. Lets say that you have three tables joined to each other which have been set to be cacheable at physical layer with Table 1 set at cache persistence time 45 min, Table 2 with 60 min and Table 3 with 30 min. You ran your answers request at 9 AM and again at 9:15 AM and again at 9:45 AM. Is the result set the same for all these 3 runs at different times? If so, Why? If Not, why not? There are transactions going on and data is being updated in these tables almost every 10 min.

63. Lets say you are on your local box with a rpd and want to make sure that it can be edited only in offline mode. How can you accomplish this? Is this possible? What settings would you change?

64. Assume there is no MUDE in your environment. Three developers have been working on three seperate projects and they have developed their rpds. As a Server Admin, you were asked to promote these three rpds. What are the next steps for you as an admin to take care of to move them to QA and production? Are there any OBIEE tools that can be handy with this situation?

65. How do you get this type of interaction in your dashboard report? When clicked on a report column, I want multiple options for drill down. Remember that I did not create any hierarchies in my rpd.

66. Lets say that you want to include a prompt to your dashboard with Start Date, End Date and some measures and dimension attributes. You want to use ‘SQL Results’ feature to automatically populate Start Date and End Date with Start Date as trunc(sysdate – 1) and End Date as trunc(sysdate). What would you do? Will you encounter any errors? How do you rectify this problem?

67. How many business models can a presentation catalog refer to? How many presentation catalogues be created from a single business model?

68. How can we create nested presentation folders (nested presentation tables) in your presentation catalog? Lets say we have ‘Facts’ all lumped together in one folder and sub divide these facts as Facts – Logical and Facts – Strategic  folders? How would you create this nested structure in presentation catalog?

69. What are logical keys? Why would you need to create them? Does the physical key gets automatically converted to logical key when the table is moved from physical layer to business model?

70. Lets say you have a report with 4 dimensional attributes and 2 fact measures in the report. Whats the default sort behavior of OBIEE when you try to run the report? On what column/columns does it sort? How do you know this?

71. In the above scenario, Is it better to have atleast one column defined in your criteria manually or just leave it without any sort criteria mentioned? Whats the difference in performance?

Until next time, Kudos to all OBIEE evangelists out there

Always, remember that these are just for your reference and to play around with the tool for different scenarios and get to know the maneuvers available with this tool. Always, practice these scenarios and thats the only way you could register them in your permanent memory of your brain

Appreciate your feedback on this poll.

Finally, Oracle OBIEE 11g has officially been launched to a very large fan base of both OBIEE and Essbase on July 7. Its a long overdue and lets see how the world receives it. As a technologist, I have PATIENTLY listened to all the Oracle’s sales pitch for 2 hrs of their recorded web cast and here are some things that I came up with that may be of interest to the OBIEE technological community.

First, some non techie stuff that was part of web cast.

Excerpts from interview held with BT Architect and CapGemini Practice Head:

Burning issues & strategies in BI initiatives:

• Engaging business in maintaining data and considering data as one of the enterprise assets.

Ex: Think of Facebook and its valuation based on user profiles created on this app. Each user profile gets valued at almost $10 and they were trying to emphasize the need for better data sourcing, cleansing and delivering data back to the users in an interactive, usable format.  As data volumes increase, data analysis efforts increase and need for better BI tools increases.

• Integrating business and IT to help close the loop.

This is not just an BI problem but more of an IT problem.

• Adoption of users (both Business Analysts & Power Users & End Users)

This has been a problem in BI space since ages (atleast in last decade where data volumes crippled like anything imaginable). Better BI tool training is needed and efforts have to be redirected for this initiative.

• Room for extendability (scalability), performance, integration of analytics into actions.

There has been a lot of emphasis on ‘integration of analytics into actions’ part all through the presentations.

• Agile BI initiatives

This has been in works recently and heard a lot in TDWI conferences recently. Would be good to see whether BT has put together a framework for others to use for launching this initiative in other places.

• Leveraging BI analytics for company profitability

The whole point of developing analytics is to drive company’s profitability. There is nothing new here.

• Leveraging BI for not just business monitoring but for IT Systems monitoring

This is something that IT managers will like. Helping them fire an event as a server goes down; dashboards to monitor your SLA metrics etc etc..

• Talk about visualization of business processes and trigerring actions based on rules.

We talked about this in ‘integration of analytics into actions’ section. Nothing new cooking here

I am a little happy to know that Oracle internally does use OBI Apps for their metrics monitoring, alerts etc etc..

There has been a big buzz (atleast lot of sales pitch) around ExaData and Oracle BI together having a perfect marriage in data warehouse environments. We have to wait and see whether thats true and need to hear some feedback from customers. Oracle did talk about one of the largest grocery chain using this for their data warehouse and BI environment (Hyperion I think is their Bi tool). I believe this is WalMart that they are talking about.

Coming to the meat of what OBIEE 11g is bringing to the table, here we go that I have found to be interesting and worth noting.

• OBIEE has a new UI for the end users.

Its not just the dashboard that got remodeled, but also the ‘Answers’ tool. This is big not just for end users but also for people who create adhoc reports and use ‘Answers’ tool every day. Of Course, this has led to some changes in ‘Admin’ tool (discuss changes in this later). This new UI also comes with a new Charting Engine (finally, Corda Charts are out of OBIEE now with this release).

Here is a snapshot of how the UI looks like:

Without aby doubt, you have seen the new icons used for Subject Areas,  Presentation Catalogs and the positioning of the 4 tabs in creating a new report namely ‘Criteria’, ‘Results’, ‘Prompts’, ‘Advanced’. There are new icons on the top of the page which I dont remember from 10g. We have to wait to see what they are (May be these icons are remodeled as they did not talk anything about these in the web cast or may be of least importance for this event). Also, see in the table, the hierarchial drill down is enabled all in one column for Customer Region in Rows and see the drill down path for Time across columns.  This is kind of very elegant. But, it comes down to how much can you configure and what options are out of box for disabling this feature and what happens when you export them to pdf or excel? Does 10g rpds and reports automatically use this new feature when promoted to 11g? I think pivot tables in 10g had real problems in its usage and configuration. Hope they are fixed now in this version. Do you think this new UI is borrowed from Hyperion web based reporting tools? Lets talk about the other features that were brought in the UI side i.e. Chart Slider and Zoom feature. I can explain them both but would love you to refer to these links which were from Oracle and well described technically

http://blogs.oracle.com/robreynolds/2010/07/obiee_11g_new_feature_chart_sl.html

http://blogs.oracle.com/robreynolds/2010/07/obiee_11g_feature_chart_zoom.html

Also, dont forget to skim through the hierarchy columns changes as mentioned in

http://blogs.oracle.com/robreynolds/2010/07/obiee_11g_new_feature_-_hierar.html

Buzz words to remember for UI enhancements are : Live Pivoting, Chart Slider, Chart Zoom.

Also showed in the demo is a feature where as you drill down in one report, all the other reports as part of the dashboard also do get drilled down based on the value chosen in the first report. This, I think, is not an enhancement but has to wait to see whether they have up with a new feature for us.

• Repository Changes using ‘Admin’ tool.

As far as I can remember from the 2 hr web cast, there is no mention of any great new feature in Admin tool. There are icon changes for almost all objects in the repository namely Logical Tables (Both Facts and Dimensions), Measures, Dimension Attributes, Hierarchies, Hierarchy Levels etc etc. Have to wait for the tool to be released to corroborate this.

• BI Search

This is going to be big for all the data owners and BI implementations. All reports, dashboards can be tagged and all the tags that you as a dashboard developer or as a Answers tool user put in, these are searchable. What a cool feature to search for reports and dashboards. Well, it also boils down to creating good meta data to be developed for all the dashboards, reports, prompts, types of reports whether its publisher report or a answers report or a prompt.

• Clustering Support for Essbase and BI Publisher

This would be huge in big corporations who deal with terabytes of data every day. There is this mention of using BI publisher as a operational reporting tool when compared to Answers tool in the web cast but I still dont think thats what their intention was. Essbase queries will now run in micro seconds rather than in sub seconds that its touted for

• Web Center Workspaces

Though there is this mention of web center workspaces, I did not completely get it. I am speculating that it has to do with integration of oracle portal, BI search and SOA.

• New Thin Client for editing BI Publisher reports

BI Publisher is still getting a face lift with this release of a new thin client where you can use create and edit BI Publisher reports. Oracle is finally going away from using MS Word, Excel as their editing tools for BI Publisher. I believe, they are still supported but not recommended.

• Encrypted Meta Data for Metadata Security

This is a nice feature to add on and very few customers might have really thought of (atleast thats my take on it). When meta data is created against your repository objects, certain objects meta data (i.e. formula, business rules, data sources) can be encrypted so that end users does not completely know whats behind the metric and its calculation.

• Action Framework

This is just an emphasis on the ‘integration of analytics into actions’ feature that I was talking to you before. Now, the action framework can be used to trigger an email, run a BPEL process, run a java method based on the business rules set on each metric. This helps in closing the loop for business folks and BI helping business to improve and act upon based on pre-defined criteria.

• Annotations, Colloboration

Talked about the annotations, online chat and work group creation for colloboration purposes based on BI report results. Seems like an extension to writeback functionality we have been used to in 10g. Will have to play with this tool before we can see the real benefit. Of Course, it helps reduce excel attachments in emails that Oracle was talking in this webcast.

• ScoreCard, KPI and Strategy Management

This is an addon that talks about the goals, KPI of the company and then breaking it down to each individual department’s goals, KPI and monitoring the results for these KPIs. Oracle has thought to resurrect the ‘Score Card’ methodology in BI space. Lets see whether they have done it right this time

Of Course, dont forget to watch this 2 minute presentation which will bring all of this together for you

http://www.oracle.com/pls/ebn/swf_viewer.load?p_shows_id=8910853&p_referred=FlashISeminar

Eagerly waiting to play with this new version and see what it brings to the table

BIG Disappointments:

• Do not know how many people really see this as a big bottleneck but I do with my existing client. My client has been thinking that Oracle will bring a merger of toolsets (Hyperion Interactive Reporting, OBIEE) as part of 11g.

• Also, you still have two plugins for Office (one for OBIEE and one for Essbase). Does it not look cool if you have just one plugin for both these purposes whether its MOLAP or ROLAP? Can they play together on a customer’s desktop? Do they have to pick one or the other?

Until next time, Kudos to all OBIEE evangelists out there and making this tool a huge success. I am sure Oracle did get this product right by merging Siebel Analytics, Essbase and access to all MOLAP, ROLAP and HOLAP technologies all in using one tool.

These are just something that I have found to be some of the very general questions coming around from many different interviewers for the last 3 quarters. I have divided them by complexity and hope these questions help you in bossting your confidence.

Remember that “Practice and Experience are the best learning methods for your next job” but getting to know what kind of questions that people ask for is also good.

We will start with easy questions first and slowly gear towards the complex questions that may make your head spin

To make this more relevant, lets assume you are running 0n OBIEE 10.1.3.4 version

1. What is the default location of a repository file?

2. How many repository files can be loaded to a BI Server simultaneously? Assume its a single server with single instance of BI Server running just to keep things easy

3. If you have more than 3 repository files mentioned in your NQSConfig.ini file as default, which one gets loaded to the memory when the BI Server is started?

Ex:

Star = SamplerRepository1.rpd, DEFAULT;

Star = SamplerRepository2.rpd, DEFAULT;

Star = SamplerRepository3.rpd, DEFAULT;

4. How do you import Essbase Cubes into your repository?

5. Whats XMLA and where is it used for in OBIEE context?

6. Can you change the location of your rpd file in your OBIEE Configuration? If Yes, Where would you mention the new location of this rpd file for Bi Server?

7. What kind of joins would you perform in the physical layer of the repository file when opened with Administration tool?

8. What are the minimum services needed to load a repository file onto memory and view a dashboard which has reports that have been refreshed on a scheduled basis?

9. Can you use an OLTP backend database for creating a dashboard?

10. How many tables are needed in minimum to pass through the Consistency Checking in Logical Layer (Business Mapping and Modeling Layer) of the repository?

11. Can you create new views in the database using OBIEE Administration tool? Can you explain the procedure for doing this?

12. What is a complex join in OBIEE and why, where is it used?

13. Is it mandatory to have hierarchies defined in your repository? If Yes, where does it help? If No, what happens in the reports?

14. How do you create outer joins in physical layer?

15. What does Consistency Checking perform; What are the minimum criteria to pass consistency checking for a given repository?

16. Does OBIEE store physical sql ? How is physical sql generated in OBIEE environments?

17. Are there any occasions where physical sql is not generated when running against a backend database like Oracle, SQL Server or any other relational database?

18. What is the best default logging level for production users?

19. What is the difference between logging level 1 and 2?

20. What are the different places (files) to view the physical sql generated by an Answers report?

21. Where does the BI Server logs its start, stop and restart times in the file system?

22. You have two tables Table 1 and Table 2 joined by a foreign key in the database? They are imported together from the database into your physical layer. Is this relationship still preserved in the OBIEE physical layer?

23. Same as question 22 but what happens if you import each table seperately?

24. If Table 1 and Table 2 are dragged from physical layer to BMM layer, which table becomes a Fact Table and which table becomes a Dimension Table?

25. What if the tables (Table 1 and Table 2) are not joined, then what happens in BMM layer?

26. What is the difference between logical table and logical table source?

27. How many LTS (Logical Table Sources) can a logical table have? Whats the minimum and maximum?

28. How many server instances can coexist in an OBIEE cluster?

29. Whats a dimension only query in OBIEE?

30. Aggregation rules are set on top of …………… columns (Physical Columns or Logical Columns or Both)

Lets get to questions that are little more complex in my opinion

31. What is alternative drill path? How do you set alternative drill path in OBIEE?

32. What are the pre-requisites for using aggregate persistence wizard? What does aggregate persistence wizard create and what does it help with?

33. Can you import data in multiple sheets from an Excel file? How do you import data from an Excel sheet? (Forget about csv files for now)

34. What are the uses of “Execute Direct SQL” feature in Answers? Is it a good practice to allow this feature for production users?

35. How do you disable “Execute Direct SQL” feature for all the users of your repository?

36. I want to store the value of the last time the respository was updated and show it in the dashboard? What type of variable can be used for this purpose?

37. Is there any way to see a list of all the repository variables defined in your repository using Answers tool?

38. What are Chronological Keys in OBIEE? How are they different from Logical Keys?

39. You want to use a database built-in function bypassing the functions defined in OBIEE? What OBIEE function helps in achieving this? Whats the syntax for this function?

40. What are the different ways to authenticate an user in OBIEE system? Can OBIEE authenticate a user passing through multiple authentication methods?

41. How do you resolve M:M relationship between tables in OBIEE? Explain a scenario where this would help?

42. Does OBIEE support ragged hierarchies? What is the procedure to import ragged hierarchies from Essbase?

43. You are trying to open a repository using Admin tool and when you click to say “Open Online”; a dialogue box pops up saying “Your rpd is available in read-only” mode. How can you edit this repository by opening online?

44. How do you set up usage tracking in OBIEE? Is the Usage Tracking mechanism in OBIEE configurable to capture new identified metrics by your department?

45. What is the default configuration for caching in NQSConfig.ini file? How method does the OBIEE use for clearing its cache?

46. Table 1 and Table 2 are joined together in an Answers query. Table 1 is defined as cachable and Table 2 is defined as not cachable? What happens to the resultset used in the Answers tool? Is the result cached or not cached?

47. What is MUDE/ MUD in OBIEE? On what basis would you create projects?

48. Two people (Developer A and Developer B) are assigned to the same project inside MUD and opened the same project simultaneously. Developer A made some changes to the project and merged his changes to the original repository. Developer B also made some changes and commited his changes to the original repository? Does the MUD environment preserve both Developer A and Developer B changes?

49. In MUDE, Can two resources checkout the same project simultaneously?

50. In MUDE, what happens if the physical tables are shared between projects?

51. What are the different types of utilities provided in OBIEE? Explain any two utilities used in your previous projects and what are they used for?

52. What are the different documentation mechanisms available in Admin tool? How do you create documentation for your Answers users against all objects available in your subject areas?

Please comment if you would like to add any new questions or suggestions to this list.

Until next time, Kudos to all OBIEE evangelists

My experience with this would probably go back to old days where you collect the “AS IS” status of the BI reports out there. Do they feed off a OLTP system or a data warehouse? Whats the future state of this BI initiative. How do we connect the existing dots to give you a vision on whats relevant to the new vision set by the management? This certainly leads you to conduct a “gap analysis”. Gap Analysis of what? Obvious answers are

• Existing business processes
• Existing technical architecture
• Existing resources

Does existing business processes support the vision set by the management? Does the existing technical architecture fit the new vision? Can the existing resources be cross-trained for this new vision.

I am sure these are dealt by the BI project managers on day to day basis.

Coming back to OBIEE, you have OBIA (Oracle Business Intelligence Analytics) that comes with pre-packaged dashboards and pre-packaged ETL mappings. Then, you have custom OBIEE development where none of the pre-packaged apps does not fit your business model. While OBIA covers 50-60% of the organizational domains, you have bolt-on apps that support your existing ERPs and other core business processes. How do I integrate these bolt-ons to the OBIA? Should I start all the way from scratch because we have invested years and years into developing a data warehouse already? Many questions linger in BI project manager’s mind before they take the next big step.

With all these premises set, lets get back to the question of how do I collect my business requirements for a new custom OBIEE initiative?
To answer this specific question, this specific list of questions have been collected and hopefully this will help you in your implementation. I am sure its not comprehensive enough, but can be a good starting point. Remember almost all these questions are relevant for any new BI reporting requirements gathering phase. Since we are talking to existing business users who are not using OBIEE yet, this is still a very good generic reporting requirements template, questionnaire.

Please add your comments to this article so others can benefit from you as you benefited from reading this article. As you know this world is all around ‘Give n Take’ mantra. When you want to take something, you have to give back to the community in other possible ways

Questions regarding existing BI reports to Business Users

• How do you access these existing reports?
• Whats the existing frequency of report updates and data updates?
• What reports go together to make them relevant?
• What other tools do you use for analyzing the data out of these reports?
• What are the report delivery mechanisms existing right now?
• Are these refreshed on a batch process or based on demand from the users?
• Any specific features in the existing report that you would like most and does not see loosing it which may cause potential business implications?
• What are the existing bottlenecks with each of these reports?
• Are the goals in existing reports still relevant?
• What are the different parameters used in these reports? Whats the frequency of each parameter being used?
• What reports do you cross check to make sure your reports are upto date and are valid?
• What reporting metrics/KPI are being created in these reports? Are there special formulae being set in these reports as we bring data from the data warehouse?
• How do you perform your routine analysis? How does the existing reports aid in getting your job done faster? Do you see any trends in what kinds of routine analysis are you being tasked with?
• How complicated can these ‘one off ‘ reports being created? How long does it take to create these reports? How often do you think the data is already available in data warehouse but not in reports?
• Who are the power users for each of these reports? Organizing these users by department, by task can give you a very good insight of what reports can be grouped together in an OBIEE dashboard.
• Is there report usage tracking mechanism already available? Do we like to see this moving further into OBIEE?
• Open up your c-level executive’s high level requirements and see whether they are being already covered by these existing reports.
• Is there a backlog of users requests for enhancing the existing reports, create a new flavor of report based on the existing report?
• Can all reports be viewed by every one? How are the users segmented so that groups can be created to access these reports?
• Does the report format change based on the user? Is there any row level security involved? Is there any column level security involved in these reports?  Simply ask ‘Who can see what’ for each of these reports.
• Do you analyze information or conduct analysis quarter over quarter or year over year? How far back do you go to support your analysis?
• Ask for access to the recent support ticket logs and see whether there is any trend of problem areas with the reports.
• Organizing the reports by business importance i.e. mission critical every day, end of month report to be ready by 2nd fiscal week of next month etc. etc..
• What is the existing support structure for these BI reports? Ex: When a user has problem, he goes to his assigned power user, if power user cant resolve it, create a ticket for BI team.
• Identify the existing drill down capabilities in the existing reports. Is this still valid? How often does these hierarchies change? Ex: A Product Hierarchy is created every month, we create a new IT request to include this new product hierarchy and it gets added.
• Identify the common dimensions and hierarchies used in most of these reports. Ex: Time, Product, Customer
• Identify the common set of filters that are being built across all these dimensions.
• What are the known gotchas with the existing data in the data warehouse. Do we have reports where multiple versions of truth is always a problem just because the way these reports are set up?
• Are there any decodes, if this is ‘x’ then ‘y’ kind of expressions developed as part of the reports?
• Are we happy with the existing refresh schedules?
• What output formats are being supported by these reports? Ex: Excel, PDF, web-based always.
• Identify any enhancements that would really delight the customer based on an existing report.
• Identify opportunities where previous attempts failed and the it did not make any financial sense at that time. Review these with your users and see whether that it is still the same.
• Document on how each of these reports fits strategically to the organization’s goals and performance monitoring. What are the success factors for your organization? Are these factors quantifiable? How do you know you are on track to achieve your results? How often does the department’s/organization’s goals change?
• Does any of the existing reports help you predict problems? Are there any alerting mechanisms built into these reports? Who gets these alerts?
• Check the reports for the visualization techniques used in the existing reports. Does it make sense to replicate them as is or see whether you can add new web 2.0 widgets for data visualizations. Ex: There was never a goal against this KPI before. Now, we have one. We like a dial chart on the first page of our report to show how we are performing weekly, quarterly, yearly.
• Identify users and see what level of familiarity do they have with this data. Segment these users based on criteria like influence, authority, participation levels. You always need high influencial, high authoritative and high participative users. Deal slowly and patiently with low influential and highly pessimistic users.
• Identify the BI technology trends in their organization. Ex: We used to have these nice and fancy all excel based reports. Then the IT has changed our strategy 5 years ago and asked us to start using Micro Strategy tool. Now, we are going to go OBIEE. Check the pulse of your users to see how excited they are.  As the technology changed, did something worked better? Did something get lost as part of the transition. Look for those transition pain points and make sure you have/develop some strategies on how to deal with them if you encounter one.

With these said, some IT analyst will suggest creating a template for this in Excel or other tool. Well, I would like to leave it as is and ask you the readers to customize the way you want or your client likes to see.

Next time, we will discuss about the tasks of BI analyst once he collects these interviews and develop some findings.

Next week.. we will follow on the tasks to be completed by the BI analyst once he interviews the business users and collects all this useful info.

Oracle has made lots of money with the Oracle database and creating tools that allow us migrate other non-oracle databases to oracle. Think about SQL Developer Migration Workbench and its vast technical documentation on how easy it is to migrate to Oracle. For more info on SQL Developer Migrations, follow this link.

If Oracle does make lot of money on OBIEE and its associated products, I am sure they are looking at something like this for all the BI migrations.

Coming back to the crux of this post, whats the easy path out there? What If I have complex universes where lot of new metrics have been already defined and developed? Does the same concept and architecture exist in OBIEE. Read this other post for more on this.

What if I have linked universes? Is there a concept like this in OBIEE? To know the concepts of Linked Universes and its associated terms like Derived Universes and the different approaches like Kernal, Master, Component Approach, follow this link. PDF Download Pg 669.

Unfortunately, there is no one to one conceptual match for linked universes in OBIEE. But, you can achieve the same by using multiple approaches in OBIEE. Remember that there is only repository (.rpd) always available online in OBIEE. What does one rpd has? Mutiple subject areas. Can we seperate users based on Subject Areas? Of Course, Yes. Can we create different metrics based on each subject area? Of Course, Yes. But remember, now you are trying to duplicate the functionality available in BO and not understanding the concept of one rpd and one metric definition across all subject areas. So, distinguish your metrics with better naming conventions and with good metadata. Use concepts of Logical Table Sources and Logical Tables carefully so you can mimic the BO universe in functionality and embracing the concept of OBIEE. For more info on Logical Table Sources (LTS), Logical Tables (LT) and Physical tables, follow this link

Until next time, Kudos to all OBIEE evangelists out there !