Today is the Thanksgiving Holiday in the United States. It is typically a holiday where families get together… the travel days around this holiday are often the busiest days from the entire year in airports and other travel hubs. As I am typing this my family is either in the kitchen preparing the afternoon meal (mmm, turkey) or outside running around (kids). I found myself – as I often do – migrating into my home office to check in online. While browing a few posts on BOB something occurred to me. I have come full circle in my “Adventures in Business Objects”. Continue reading “Full Circle: Memories of the Beginning”
Earlier today I delivered my GBN Conference presentation to an audience over the web. It was… interesting. 🙂 I have done web presentations before but never to an audience of this size. I didn’t have time to count, but it seemed like there were well over 100 attendees that stayed through to the very end. I hope they (or you, if you were online) found the time to be worthwhile.
It was certainly different for me. Presenting to a live audience is not stressful to me at all anymore. I have enough experience that it just doesn’t bother me. Whether I am delivering a training class to an audience of ten, or a conference presentation to an audience of hundreds, it doesn’t make me nervous at all. But today on the call was a different story. Continue reading “Webinar is Done, Whew!”
The presentation that I did for the 2008 GBN conference earlier this year has been scheduled for a webcast that will be hosted on the GBN web site. Registration is required, but it’s fairly simple. If you go to the GBN Home Page there is a link for Webcast Series on the right side of the screen. Clicking that link will take you to the schedule, and a link to sign up for the various presentations, including this one.
There are other speakers from the GBN conference that will be delivering their presentations in this format as well. I just get to go first and iron out all of the bugs in the process. 🙂
A Brief Overview of Measure Objects
A universe has three basic types of result objects: dimensions, details, and measures. Measure objects are analytical values like dollars or quantities. Measure objects have two extra settings that dimensions and details do not have: a SQL aggregate function and a report Projection function. The SQL aggregate function is not enforced by the application, but it should always be present. (That’s a subject for another blog post. Or two.)
The SQL aggregate function is performed by the database server, and the projection function is used by the report engine. This is what makes measures “roll up” when you slice and dice or drill on a report. The problem is, certain calculations cannot be done by the database because there is no valid projection function. Designer 3.x gives me a way to address that by introducing a new projection function setting of Database delegated. This post will explain why that’s important and how it works.
Continue reading “Designer XI 3 New Feature: Database Delegated Measures”
Designer has provided the option to create “stub joins” in a universe for quite a few years. A stub join is a permanent where clause on a table that appears as a small stub rather than a full join connecting two tables. This feature has often been used to apply security to a table via a reference to the @Variable(‘BOUSER’) value.
However this strategy had one major flaw in that if the table was not referenced in the query then the security would not be applied. I now have a much more flexible (and powerful) option in Designer 3: Class Restrictions.
Continue reading “Designer XI 3 New Feature: Class Restrictions”
The @Prompt() function has been around for a very long time. There have been subtle changes made to it over the years to support some of the new Web Intelligence extended options but they were not always documented. I don’t know about you, but I find using undocumented features a bit daunting. 🙂
Continue reading “Designer XI 3 New Feature: Extended Prompt Syntax”
