OBIEE 11g Concepts (I) - What are Analyses? & what is Analysis Editor?

There are number of questions business users ask around OBIEE/OBIA implementations. Some of them are specific to functional stuff e.g.  #invoice on hold represents # hold invoices or # invoices items?  In addition some of the ambitious questions are around product features and basic product offerings e.g. what is difference between filter and selection steps?    How many different types of views OBIEE supports etc.

This blog series is an attempt to give a simple layman definition of number of concepts or OBIEE 11g terminology /offering. In this blog I am covering Analyses and Analysis Editor concepts/offering of OBIEE 11g. The definitions are extracted from Oracle Standard Product documentation.

What are Analyses?

An analysis is a query against an organization's data that provides answers to business questions. A query contains the underlying SQL statements that are issued to the Oracle BI Server.

Analyses let you explore and interact with information by visually presenting data in tables, graphs, pivot tables, and so on. You can save, organize, and share the results of analyses. As an author, analyses that you create can be saved in the Oracle BI Presentation Catalog and integrated into any Oracle BI dashboard. Analyses can be enhanced through features such as graphs, result layout, calculated items, and drilling.

Analyses offer following benefits:

Limited authoring rights can be granted to users who have a need for custom analyses, but creating analyses is not their main job function

Formulas can be manipulated and filters applied at the column level allowing for more targeted retrieval of data.

What is the Analysis Editor?

The "Analysis editor" lets report author explore and interact with information by visually presenting data in tables, graphs, pivot tables, and so on. Report author can include the views that you create in an analysis for display in dashboards.

The Analysis editor contains the following tabs:

Criteria tab — I allows report author specify the criteria for an analysis, including columns, and filters. Author can specify the order, in which the results should be returned, formatting (such as headings, number of decimal places, styles such as fonts and colors, and conditional formatting), and column formulas (such as adding a Rank or Percentile function).

Results tab — it allows report author to create different views of the analysis results such as graphs, tickers, and pivot tables. Author can also add or modify selection steps

Prompts tab — it allows report author to create prompts that allow users to select values to filter an analysis or analyses on a dashboard. Prompts allow users to select values that dynamically filter all views within the analysis or analyses. You can also create prompts for use with selection steps, both for member selection steps and qualifying condition steps.

Advanced tab — it allows report author to edit XML code and examine the logical SQL statement that was generated for an analysis. You can use the existing SQL statement as the basis for creating a new analysis. The tabs of the Analysis editor are organized into various panes and areas. As author work, he/she can manage these panes to suit user’s needs.

Analysis Editor Vs BI Composer

Author access the Analysis editor for creating or editing an analysis. If user is accessing Oracle BI in accessibility mode, then, Analysis editor is replaced by the BI Composer.

This blog series is an attempt to expand my blog reach to BI End User or Business Users along with BI Developers/Architects.