By default the Create Bookmark Link is enabled in the dashboard page options menu:

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This was a presentation given by Mark Richards and describes the role of an ESB and particularly what it provides. It is an old presentation (23 oct 2006) but still very true, in the fact that there are still a lot of different definitions of an ESB within the world. This is a short recap of this presentation.

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Most XML tutorials will explicitly mention that empty elements in XML are allowed. And then surprisingly little of them will tell you what they are for. On a superficial view, empty elements are a concept to trivial to discuss. But now that many vendors support XML based integration with their products, you may be in for a surprise or two.

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In a previous article: (http://knowledge.ciber.nl/weblog/?p=162) I showed you how to setup the OBIEE Metadata dictionary. In practice people tend to forget to update this dictionary when the repository is brought to production and it tens to get outdated over a period of time.

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The metadata dictionary is a very powerful support package within OBIEE. Sadly it is not commonly used at this moment. This is mainly caused by the fact that the functionality is very poorly documented by Oracle.

This article describes the configuration and implementation of the OBIEE metadata dictionary both on an OC4J and an IIS web services. (Other web services can be easily configured based on of these systems)

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The classical way of making a LOV prompt is creating SQL in the form:

SELECT case 1=0 then TABLE.COLUMN else "YES" end from BM_NAME union all SELECT case 1=0 then TABLE.COLUMN else "NO" end from BM_NAME

This always produces costly SQL since OBIEE will execute this as a SELECT DISTINT against the reference table.

Much better is to add a small LOV table to repository with it’s own business model. I created a small XLS spreadsheet with a couple of LOV’s:

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Recently I was asked to take a look at the possibilities of using Google Earth and Google Maps for a possible client project. That project didn’t quite work out, but I found out some useful things about GE and GM regardless which I think are interesting enough to share here.

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In addition to settings mentioned in this article:  http://knowledge.ciber.nl/weblog/?p=150. You sometimes you want to bypass the presentation / cache for development purposes. Or more often when you get weird write back behaviour. Add this to the instanceconfig file:

<CacheMaxExpireMinutes>-1</CacheMaxExpireMinutes>

<CacheMinExpireMinutes>-1</CacheMinExpireMinutes>

<CacheMinUserExpireMinutes>-1</CacheMinUserExpireMinutes>

Till Next Time

John Minkjan is a principal BI-consultant and OBIEE Product Expert at Ciber in the Netherlands, the text of this article is also published on his personal blog http://obiee101.blogspot.com/

Consider the following data:

If we put this in a timeline graph we get:

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Due to more and more compliance rules a lot of DWH’s these days have there data stored based on the SCF principal (Slowly Chancing Fact). A typical example of SCF data is the state of an order:

I

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