Sep 24 2007
Enter The Ninja
I finally finished and submitted my presentations (part I and II) this weekend. It is always interesting to me to see how things evolve during the creative process compared to the abstracts, or even compared to my initial ideas. This year I am really happy with the way my presentations turned out; they are going through the review process now. Of course they were due a few weeks ago… 😳
In my experience, building a good presentation isn’t just about content. Although that is certainly important, the presentations that have received the best marks over time have also had a theme, or some sort of continuity or flow. That is one of the challenges with writing a technical presentation, and one that I think I have met this time.
In Ninja Part I the topics include an in-depth review of Index Awareness. I have talked about this in the past, but this time I really go into a lot of detail about how to set it up, when it works, and when it doesn’t work. I also include in-depth coverage of shortcut joins and the JOIN_BY_SQL.
In Ninja Part II the topics include a few tricks using derived tables as well as a discussion of using “ALL” in prompts. I include the standard technique (for those that may not have ever seen it) and then show an alternate technique that one of our Integra consultants used at a client site that dramatically improved performance. I also show how to include “ALL” in a cascading prompt, which is not a simple process! 😯
For my demonstrations I converted the standard eFashion and Island Resorts universes to Oracle. I have also created a snowflake version of eFashion in order to demonstrate some of the techniques mentioned above.
I expect that (as usual) my presentations will be posted on the Integra presentations page once the conference is complete. What is new is that I will also be posting them here on my blog, which will give you an option to ask a question about a specific technique that I talked about. If you’re coming to the conference I hope to see you there. If not, you know where to find me. 8)
Oooh, you big tease! Sounds very exciting. I’ll be interested to hear how your ratings for these presentations compare to previous years.
Nick, the best-ever rating that I had was for Las Vegas in 2001. With nearly 400 people attending my presentation (out of 1100 at the conference I might add 😉 ) I had an overall rating of 4.85 out of 5.0. I have never made that high of a number since, nor do I expect to. I consider anything over 4.5 to be exceptional, and strive for numbers across the board that are 4.0 or higher.
Dave, due to collisions with other breakouts I am interested in I will attend Ninja I on Wednesday and Ninja II on Thursday. I hope you will not start any good joke on Wednesday’s Ninja I and finish it on Ninja II on the same day 🙂 I am joking. I just want to be sure that both Ninja II presentations will be same and I will not lose anything important. Thanks
The are probably going to be the same. I say “probably” because in the past when I have had extra time between the first presentation and a repeat I have (on occasion) added some extra slides to answer questions that come up the first time I do the presentation. This year the presentations are full enough that I’m not sure I will have room.
Bottom line: the presentations are intended to be identical. 8)
Dave,
Unfortunetly I will be unable to attend the Orlando convention. Will any of your presentations be available as a download here (at your site)? Do you know of any other sites that will offer the downloads?
Thanks
All of the Integra presentations will be available for download on the Integra web site. My presentations will be available here as well, and there will be a blog post (or two or three) related to each one where people can ask questions.
Business Objects will provide a web site for conference attendees that will include all of the conference materials, but you have to attend the conference to get the site password. To the best of my knowledge there will not be any third-party site that will be allowed to share all of the presentations from the conference. If there were, then nobody would go. 🙂
Dave –
Excellent article on Cascading List of Value with “ALL” to handle hierarchy. I am trying to follow the same, but struck at Slide 43 and 44.
In slide 43 – you have defined conditions “Country” and “All Country” – any reason created separately? Can we create this as one condition?
In slide 44 – where you get two prompts like country of origin and Country.Region. But when I run Web I, I get tree structure in LOV not 2 different prompts.
I have followed the steps, when I select US >> -All-, I get “No data to retrieve”. But When I select US >> (), I get data. Somehow I am missing that “ALL” functionality.
Thanks
Shabo
Every time I look at this I have to review the work because of the confusion… but I think one of them is going to include a prompt for country and the other allows all countries to come back. Without the two of them, you miss part of the functionality.
Dave –
I have 10 levels of hierarchy in my requirement. But I am stuck in 3 level itself. Not sure whether I could complete for 10 levels. At the end of the presentation, you have mentioned to create a combined filter for all possibilities.
Do all the prompt condition should have same Text for prompts like “Enter Values for 10 levels:-“?
Thanks
Shabo
I seriously doubt it will work for 10 levels. 😯 For three levels the LOV query has four union queries. For four levels the LOV would have to include 8 union queries, which is the limit for the query panel in Desktop Intelligence. That query panel appears to be the same tool used in Designer to build custom LOV queries, so I think you’re stuck at that point.
Besides, remember that with this as well as other cascading LOV techniques, the user must go all the way to the bottom of the list before they can make a selection. They cannot stop half-way through the process.
Dave,
Your inputs on cascading prompt in XIR2 had helped me a lot. We are in the process of migrating from XIR2 to BI 4 and almost all of our reports use Cascading Prompts.
I tried with one of our simple universe and the cascading Prompt does not work as expected in BI 4. I do not see the ‘+’ sign to expand the initial prompt and selected the subsequent prompts. Were you able to recreate cascading prompt with the technique you had document in “Ninja Part Two”? Or are their additional changes that are required to make this to work?
Regards,
Adnan