The Value of Adding Commentary to OBIEE

As you probably already know, OBIEE does not have a commentary function built in.

So, you and your team are probably using manual workarounds — taking screenshots, adding text descriptions, referencing documents in email attachments — to discuss insights.

But what if you could add comments and documents directly to OBIEE dashboards and reports? How much time and effort would that feature save you?

In this blog post, we’ll share how you can implement that functionality with one simple tool and — more importantly — how it will help your team.

12 OBIEE Performance Tips You Need to Know

If your users are complaining about performance issues, you know you have problems. But, what are they? How do you solve them?

As the administrator, you want to be on top of these performance issues, solving them before they affect your users. These 12 performance tips can help you become a more proactive administrator.

Why You Should Connect EBS to OBIEE

The Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) of applications include a variety of capabilities across your enterprise, including customer relationship management, financial management, supply chain management, and more.

Though the applications give you a view of these processes, EBS isn’t organized in a way that makes it easy to evaluate the data and identify trends. Organizations that previously relied on Discoverer for this type of data analysis now need a new solution after the loss of support for the tool. This is where OBIEE comes in. In this blog post, we’ll look at why OBIEE should become a part of your experience with EBS.

4 Factors Affecting Your OBIEE Performance

Poor performance tends to come up a lot when people talk about OBIEE. It’s a definite source of frustration, especially when finding the root cause of performance issues is no simple task. But things can get better — you just have to know where to start.

This blog post can act as a starting point to solving your performance issues. In it, we’ll tell you about several factors that might be affecting your OBIEE performance and we’ll even offer you several solutions.

5 Tips and Tricks for OBIEE Power Users

Needless to say, you won’t become an OBIEE power user overnight. If you’re new to the tool, you have a lot to learn. If you’ve been using the tool for a few years, you still have a lot to learn. With OBIEE, the learning never stops.

The great news is there are a lot of cool tricks out there that can help you become a better OBIEE user. In this blog post, we’ll cover 5 tips and tricks — and then show you where you can find even more.

How Do I Increase BI User Adoption? 5 Ways to Ensure Successful BI Training

So, you have this great business intelligence tool that came with many promises. The promise to give you valuable insight to grow your organization. The promise to ease and automate your processes. The promise to improve visibility into your operations. The list goes on. But none of that means anything without user adoption.

People get set in their ways and tend to dislike change — making user adoption a tricky situation. The solution to this problem is training, but it’s not as simple as it sounds. There are several steps you must take to ensure your BI training is effective and enacts user adoption throughout your organization.

In this blog post, we’ll talk about how you can ensure successful training that will, in turn, increase user adoption.

The Top 5 BI Downloads of 2017

At US-Analytics, we’re always looking ahead, but we also realize looking back is important for continual growth. It was a big year for us. We acquired BI firm Rittman Mead America Inc., extending our business analytics expertise and offerings.

This means you can expect even more BI resources coming in 2018 — so keep an eye out. For now, you can check out our most popular downloads from 2017 to help you prepare and jumpstart a successful new year.

Essbase Tutorial: 10 Steps to Eliminate Hard Coding in the Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

Recently, I was assisting with the migration of a new managed services client to hosting provider, Armor. The migration is a custom data warehouse using standard products such as Oracle RDBMS, Essbase, and Oracle Data Integrator (ODI). After the installation and migration, I started reviewing the Essbase load rules and learned the rules were hard coded. Specifically, the load rules utilize Oracle RDBMS as a data source which is specified in the Oracle Call Interface (OCI) dialog box. OCI is an alternative to ODBC and improves interface time for both data and dimension builds. Using OCI is also advantageous because it does not require the creation of an ODBC data source, however, an Essbase variable can be utilized to specify the connection — this will be demonstrated in the tutorial.

Comparing Business Analytics Products: OBIEE 12c vs. BICS vs. Data Visualization vs. OAC

Looking for an enterprise-wide business analytics solution? Oracle has an app for that. Want cost-effective dashboards and reporting for departmental use? Oracle has an app for that. Or do you want an advanced data discovery and visualization tool? Yep, Oracle's got that too. 

You get the picture — Oracle has an app for almost every business intelligence need. 

But how do you find the right app? The quadrants on the right provide one way to think about Oracle’s range of business analytics offerings. Does your organization want control in the hands of functional users or IT? Do you prefer an on-premises or cloud environment? This blog post will help you decide which product is the best fit for your company by showing you what each product brings to the table.

The Dos & Don'ts of Data Visualization with Oracle Tools

“Data visualization” and “infographic” have been buzzwords in the design realm for the last decade. These days it’s hard to browse through a statistic-laden article on a website or magazine without coming across a glossy graphic, complete with charts and flashy illustrations, that make the 400 words next to it obsolete. Readers get all the information they need at first glance from the visualization.

Corporate is usually last to jump on the design train, especially with internal documents. When was the last time your company hired a graphic design firm to spruce up your annual report? Never? There’s a lot of value in presenting a chart or graphic versus a wall of numbers. Programs like Microsoft PowerPoint attempt to make this easy to accomplish, but easy is a relative term. Easy is not automated.

Oracle Visual Analyzer is automated: no fussing with formatting, slide transitions, or SmartArt. Your data is displayed in beautiful, rich visualizations that everyone on your team can benefit from, at a glance.

Follow these tips to make sure you’re setting yourself up for success with data visualizations from Oracle tools.