At the risk of opening a large can of worms, I was wondering about the possibility of a forum for those of us that are using competitor products along with SAPBO products. For example, my current project is using Data Services for ETL and Oracle BIEE for reporting. Although I’m only supposed to be helping withthe ETL, I keep getting dragged into conversations about how OBI works (answer - very different to BO). Whilst I can comment in a general way and Google searches have proved useful, a BOB forum might have been helpful. I appreciate that this is an odd request, but I’ve noticed that there are a few posts on BOB about OBIEE and they have been useful to me.
I’d be interested in other peoples comments on this idea.
Yes, but those discussions are more around general usage or sales comparisons. My proposal is a forum for detailed technical questions e.g. I need to write a report that contains columns from two fact tables. How do I do this using OBIEE?
Some things that are trival using a BO product are incredibly challenging (and I’m being polite here) when using competitor products. In my experience, BOB is the best technical forum around - it’s easy to find sensible answers to help with problems and there’s very little spam.
I am also currently working on OBIEE (my first OBIEE project) and I can understand your situation. There are some good forums on OBIEE (independent blogs) but yes, no doubt, those are nothing in comparison to BOB
In fact, I have worked on many reporting tools and must say, you won’t find a better forum like BOB for any other BI Reporting tool
Having such a common forum would help with one of my favorite bugbears: Separation of function.
Reporting tools can do a terrific set of things for you, but frequently if you start burying business rules in a reporting tool the ability to modify them is restricted to a small group of people that have 1) the understanding of the business rules, 2) technical skills in the reporting tool (usually a smaller group than databases as a whole), 3) access to the tool (frequently a licensing issue)
I’m a huge proponent of MVC architecture and I view BO (and all tools in its class) as overpowered tools for the “view” portion of that.
The model of course is your set of underlying source tables.
The controller aspect in this interpretation is the layer where you properly apply your business rules. This is made up of actual tables and/or views and lookups on top of the data tables.
Presenting information to users can be as simple as making a report on an existing Universe or as complex as tracking down data sources and building a whole new infrastructure starting from a datawarehouse. If we had a forum (or a sister site) for other reporting tools we could also being to extract generic concepts that are best practices for handling data.
We already deal with syntactic differences between Oracle and SQL Server here in addition to the OS platform issues of where you have your BO installed. (musing out loud here. How many dimensions do we already have on BOB? BO version, OS of install, database for BO meta-data, BO client. That’s at least four technical dimensions and then for the meet-ups we have to track geographic info too)
Perhaps adding OBIEE to BOB is not the answer, but finding or creating a sister site might be.
(BOB member since 2004-06-09)
(BOB member since 2003-11-27)
(BOB member since 2002-06-20)
(BOB member since 2007-10-23)
