Monday 17 September 2012

The 11g Features

There has been a lot of deserved hype about the major enhancements in OBIEE 11g such as Action Framework and Embedded Maps, but we thought it would be a good idea to start compiling a list of the more subtle enhancements you may not have heard about!    


1) Multiple Subject Areas

Did you know that Answers reports (Analyses) can now be sourced from multiple Subject Areas?    This is significant as it means you no longer have to cram lots of content into a single Subject Area!


2) Conditional Data Formatting

When you apply Conditional Formatting via "Column Properties" in Answers, there is an additional tab to allow you to conditonally change the "Data Format" as well as the "Style".


3) Case-Insensitive Searching

When using the "search" facility to choose your filter values within Answers, there is now a "Match Case" option that enables you to perform a case-insensitive search.
NOTE: There is also a "Match Case" option when performing member selection


4) Conditional Formatting

Conditional formatting is now possible on Pivot Tables (even on Hierarchical Columns).   


5) Dashboard Prompts

There is a new style of dashboard prompt called a "Variable Prompt" which allows you to specify your own custom list of values for the dashboard prompt (instead of always having to source the values from a Subject Area)


6) Importing RPD Metadata

Within the Physical layer of the RPD, when you right-mouse click on a Connection Pool there is a new "Import Metadata" option.    When adding further tables, this new option is much better than the "File > Import" menu option because all the new metadata will get imported directly into the existing Physical Database (so you won'tyou get another Physical Database created).
To make it even better, this new "Import Metadata" option will perform an incremental update of your existing tables and their columns.   So if you create new columns on your database, the tables in the RPD will be incrementally updated.   


7) Time Series Calculations

There are now 3 types of Time Series calculation available (AGO, TODATE and PERIODROLLING).    Another great enhancement is that it is now possible for report developers to build their own Time Series calculations in Answers, so you no longer have to rely on them being created in the RPD.   


8) Building Subject Areas

In the BI Administration tool, you can right-mouse click on a Business Model and choose the option "Build Subject Areas for Logical Stars and Snowflakes".    This option will automatically create a Subject Area dedicated to each logical fact in your Business Model.    Each Subject Area will one logical fact together with all its related logical dimensions.


9) Archiving/Unarchiving

You can now archive/unarchive BI Presentation Catalog content directly within the dashboard front-end, you no longer need to use the BI Catalog Manager utility.


10) Presentation Variables

It is now possible to assign multiple values to a Presentation Variable.


11) Rename Wizard

In the BI Administration Tool, you can now right-mouse click on an object and choose the "Rename Wizard" option.   This is a short-cut which will invoke the Rename Wizard directly for all the objects you selected.    In OBIEE 10g, you could only invoke the Rename Wizard via the "Tool" menu and it meant you would always have a few extra steps to do the renaming you wanted to.
There is also new new formatting option with the Rename Wizard:  Change all occurences of "_" into a space


12) LDAP Authorization

With the new OBIEE 11g security model, it is now possible for OBIEE to find out the "groups" belonging to a user directly from an LDAP store.    In OBIEE 10g, you could only do this indirectly via a PL/SQL package.


13) BI Publisher - Local Excel Files

It is now possible with BI Publisher 11g to upload your own local MS Excel files and use them as a data source for your BI Publisher reports.


14) RPD File Compression

To reduce storage needs, repositories are now stored in a compressed format. Because of this, you may notice that the size of an RPD file opened and saved in this release is significantly smaller than the size of RPD files from previous releases.


15) Oracle OLAP Integration

OBIEE 11g can now supports Oracle OLAP as a data source.    This means Oracle OLAP is now a definite option for OBIEE if you need to optimise the underlying Data Warehouse.


16) Master-Detail Linking

In addition to "drill-down" and "navigation", there is a new "Master-Detail Linking" capability which allows users to click on one table/graph/map to automatically apply filters to other views within the same Analysis (it can even apply filters to other Analyses on the same Dashboard Page).


17) View Selectors

It is now possible to include Compound Layouts in view selectors.

 

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