Pivot Tables are a great feature of Oracle BI. It is arguably one of the most used views when designing reports, and offers immediate hindsight on data with drilldown capabilities on both rows and columns.
Such intelligence power comes with a few limitations though.
Pivot Tables aren’t made to visualise large amounts of data (data dumps are best managed through normal tables or even better, direct download to Excel/flat files).

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When reviewing sales data, sometimes there is a need to show not only the data that exists, but also the data that does not exist. For instance, in the tables below we can see that no revenue was generated in the month of April and also that no revenue was generated from customer JKL between January and June.

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In this entry I will explain how to set up Single Sign-On for OBIEE in IIS environment. For those unfamiliar with the terminology, I’ll start with just a quick overview to explain what IIS and OC4J are:

OBI is by default deployed on OC4J (Oracle Containers for Java) web application server. What does it actually mean? It simply means that the core OBI application will run on OC4J platform. This application by default is called “analytics” and the default port for OC4J is 9704 (as in http://hostname:9704/analytics).

Apart from the default installation we have other deployment options. One of the most popular being the IIS deployment – using Microsoft’s Internet Information Services instead of OC4J. Again we will have application called analytics, but the default IIS port will be 80 (as in http://hostname:80/analytics or simply http://hostname/analytics as 80 is the default HTTP port).

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Oracle BI EE not only helps you to visualize information using charts and graphs, but it also gives you the opportunity to add geographical dimension to your reports.

With today’s globalization of business, many organizations have their branch offices located in various countries or even across different continents. Viewing individual branches and their performance, presented on the geographical map, can give companies further insights into their business. Oracle provides a powerful engine that can analyze and display the data from your data warehouse on the map or even integrate it with Google maps.

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One of the things OBIEE doesn’t have out of the box is a user comment option (although future versions may have integration with Oracle Webcenter, which provides social computing). So what are our options if we need to leave comments about specific reports/dashboards or give users the option to add documentation to the reports? One option is to embed Google wave in an OBI dashboard for feedback and wiki type documentation.

Google wave is a new kind of collaboration tool that combines elements of email, wiki and chat. Basically everything on a wave can be edited. A varying number of users can be part of the wave or it can be public like in the example below. A wave can be embedded on any Web page. An embedded wave can be edited either on the page itself or through Google wave accounts.

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