Difference between filters and selection steps OBIEE 11g?

What is the difference between filters and selection steps OBIEE 11g?

In one way both filters and selection steps to limit the results(that are displayed when an analysis is run) in any analysis.Also,Both can be applied directly to attribute and measure columns but filters should will be applied before the selection steps are applied.
Filters:Filters are applied before the query is aggregated and affect the query and thus the resulting values for measures.
Selection steps:These are applied after the query aggregated and affect only the members displayed,not the resulting aggregate values.

Table prompts column space issue OBIEE 11g

Table prompts column space issue OBIEE 11g:

I have a report with table view and 2 columns included in table prompts section.When i see the report in dashboard 2 prompts are distant from each other.How can i reduce the space between the 2 table column prompts?

Solution:Go to table view column properties->Additional formatting Options->Right Padding->760(as per requirement)

Remove Dashboard section borders OBIEE 11g

How to remove/hide the Dashboard section borders:

 Edit dashboard->section->format section->CSS properties->display:hidden;(CSS class and CSS style).

Topics to prepare for OBIEE 11g Certification EXAM(1Z0-591)

Oracle BI and EPM System Overview

• Describe how OBIEE addresses business intelligence challenges
• Describe the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) products

OBIEE Architecture

• Describe major components of the OBIEE architecture
• Describe the function of each component

Oracle BI Installation

• Describe the Installation Architecture for OBIEE
• Explain system requirements, supported platforms and installation pre-requisites
• Install OBIEE

OBIEE User Interface Overview

• Describe the components of OBIEE User Interface
• Perform Oracle Analysis to construct, modify, and save BI requests
• Build Dashboards
• Create BI Delivers

Dimensional Modelling

• Describe the differences between Transactional and Analytical Systems
• Describe Data Warehousing
• Build Dimensions, Facts and Hierarchies
• Explain Dimensional Modelling

Oracle BI Repository Overview

• Describe the three layers of the OBI Repository
• Use the Administration Tool to view and modify the repository

Build Basic Repository

• Define a System Data Source Name (DSN) for a data source
• Build the Physical layer of the Repository
• Build the Logical layer of the Repository
• Build the Presentation layer of the repository

Repository Testing and Deployment

• Describe techniques for testing a repository
• Validate and test a repository

Complex Repository Modeling

• Describe Derived Metrics and its use
• Configure Derived Metrics based on existing logical columns
• Configure Derived Metrics based on physical columns

Advanced Repository Modeling

• Create Data Partitioning
• Create Segmentation of Data
• Create Time Series Data

Building a Repository with Multiple Sources

• Add multiple sources to an existing logical table source for a dimension in the business model
• Add a second table source to a dimension in the business model

Hierarchies and Level Based Measures

• Create a dimensional hierarchy
• Use level-based measures
• Create a rank measure
• Describe Aggregate tables and the purpose they serve
• Create Aggregate tables in the OBI repository

Using Variables

• Explain session variables
• Describe repository variables
• Describe initialization blocks
• Implement a dynamic repository variable

Implementation Methodology and Best Practices

• Describe the implementation phases

Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Security

• Describe authentication and authorization
• Describe the different levels at which security is enforced
• Configure security using Security Manager
• Configure Query Governing controls

Cache Management & Performance Tuning

• Explain the purpose of cache in OBIEE
• Configure caching and manage cache files
• Develop caching strategies
• Describe the request and data flow in OBIEE

MS Office Integration

• Use MS Office Plug-In for OBIEE
• Describe the required components to enable office integration
• Install and configure MS office server and client for OBIEE

Spatial Integration

• Explain Spatial Intelligence and Integration
• Add Map based visualization to OBIEE

Write Back within OBIEE

• Describe Write Back capabilities
• Configure Write Back with OBIEE

Essbase Integration

• Implement Essbase as a Data Source
• Configure BI Server Metadata for Essbase
• Explain Essbase Integration

More Details:

http://education.oracle.com/pls/web_prod-plq-dad/db_pages.getpage?page_id=5001&get_params=p_exam_id:1Z0-591

Describe the differences between Transactional & Analytical Systems

Transactional systems (OLTP): Deals with transactional/operational system data; frequently updated& queried. The transaction databases stores the current data in normalized format. So, the expected query response is very fast.

Analytical systems (OLAP): Deals with Historical long period of time data from OLTP system. It is a large volume of data; so the query response is slow.

	OLTP	OLAP
Business Purpose	Day to day business process	Business forecasting/Analysis/Decision making
Users	Application users	Data analysis Users
Data volume	Depends on the transactions	Large volume of data
Refresh	Immediate	Regular intervals
Data model	ER model	Dimensional model
Schema	Normalized	Star
Query Response	Fast	Slow
Orientation	Transaction	Analysis
Focus	Data in	Information out
Characteristic	Operational processing	Informational processing

Describe the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) Products

Describe the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) is a package and integrated with enterprise BI products to deliver the wide range of BI capabilities.

Products:

• Interactive dashboards & Visualizations
• Proactive intelligence & alerts
• Enterprise reporting & Publishing
• Ad-hoc Analysis & dashboard construction
• Action Framework, to initiate business process in context of insights.

Interactive dashboards & Visualizations:

• Providing highly interactive dashboards to access the content/multiple objects (Reports ,  Prompts , Folders etc.) at one place.
• Better visualizations by providing the Rich user interface, Updated graphing engine, New graph formatting tools and introduction of slider control.
• Master-Detail linking of visualizations.
• New dashboard prompts.

Proactive intelligence & Alerts: OBIEE 11g features a powerful, near real-time, multi-step alert engine that can trigger workflow based on business events & notify stakeholders via their preferred medium& channel.BI deliver monitor the business activities and send the alerts accordingly.

Enterprise reporting & Publishing: It is the most efficient and scalable reporting solution available for complex & distributed environments.BI publisher deal with distribute/publish highly formatted Reports/Templates & documents such as flash reports w.r.t High Quality and Volume reports.

Ad-hoc Analysis & Dashboard construction: Providing the business users with full ad-hoc query, analysis capability & modify the existing reports in dashboard pages to free the business user from data structure complexity. Ad-hoc reports & direct database requests accessed by answers.

Action Framework: Action Framework is an Interactive new feature of OBIEE 11g that gives the functionality to invoke a variety of actions or processes directly within user interface.

Describe how OBIEE addresses business intelligence challenges

Business Intelligence solutions, which can be built on the data warehousing concepts to analyse data. OBIEE is a powerful tool and providing the Rich Interactive web user interface and highly intuitive. Also, supports multiple sources to build the solution.

Challenges against the Business Intelligence:

1. Data Analysis -The ability of a BI solution to help produce better business decisions via timely, accurate and more comprehensive analysis of available corporate information assets.
2. Forecasting -The ability of BI to identify growth opportunities.
3. Cost Benefit -The ability of BI to reduce costs and wastage by identifying areas of high expenditure, operational inefficiencies and analysing transactional records.

How OBIEE addresses the Business Intelligence challenges:

OBIEE provides the BI capabilities, including dashboards, ad-hoc analysis, proactive detection and alerts, enterprise reporting, disconnected analytics, MS Office integration, real-time predictive analytics and more.

In addition to providing the full range of BI functionality, the OBIEE platform is based on a proven, modern Web Services-Oriented Architecture that delivers true next-generation BI capabilities.

Key Benefits:

• Reduce cost and increase productivity with a common infrastructure for producing and delivering enterprise reports, scorecards, dashboards, ad hoc analysis, and OLAP Analysis which Increase user adoption with a powerful, task-oriented navigation framework. Features such as rich web interface/visualization, interactive dashboards, animated reporting options, OLAP style interactions and innovative search and actionable collaboration features deliver an unrivalled end-user experience.
• Provide better alignment and visibility across the organization by ensuring that all metrics, calculations and definitions are uniformly consistent
• Integrate with all popular ETL tools (extraction, transformation and load), databases, business applications, application servers, security tools, enterprise portals, and desktop tools to optimize performance while simplifying systems configuration and life cycle management. An integrated systems management console provides superior scalability, high availability, and security benefits, while making upgrades and systems management effortless.

Finally, OBIEE provides all the required features for real time reporting to analyse the data and identifying future opportunities.

Latest Interview Questions

OBIEE 11g latest interview Questions

1. What are all the other objects you can use in physical layer other than tables?
ANS:FUNCTIONS,PROCEDURES,SELECT statement,Materialized views,OPAQUE

2. What is a materialized view?
ANS: Materialized view is a physical object and replica of the one or more master objects.It will refresh in an intervals.

3. Have you ever tried with de-normalized Database to build reports? If yes, How to handle?
ANS: Building reports on de-normalized data is not a best practice it leads to performance issues but we can build the reports. These are reports can’t be used for business analysis because the data will fluctuate non regular intervals.

4. Employee table, Department table

a) How to get the duplicate records from the employee table?
ANS: select * from employee group by EMPID having count(EMPID)>1;

b) How to establish a primary key, foreign key join between employee and department tables?
ANS:DEPARTMENT is the PRIMARY KEY AND EMPLOYEE is the FOREIGN KEY.

c) If I want to add another department to the each employee, what are all the ways to design the tables?
ANS:Create an another DEPARTMENT column to the EMPLOYEE TABLE.

5. Have to ever work with complex BMM layer? Not like star and snow flake schema? Generally what are all the objects it includes?
ANS:YES,It includes BRIDGE tables,LOOK-UP tables,HIERARCHIES,TIME SERIES functions,Complex calculations,SNOW FLAKE schema etc.