Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

I have uploaded the latest pdf files for my presentations from the 2009 GBN conference. You can download them from my conference presentations page. I did two presentations this year.

Return of the Variables

Presentation Abstract

It’s time to pull out some variables again as we revisit a popular topic from past conferences. Report variables can provide a more creative, efficient, and effective means of completing the detailed analysis required for your reports. The focus of this presentation is building documents, using report functions, and reviewing variable tricks that can be used to solve reporting challenges. The presentation this year will focus primarily on the SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence product and include some of the newest features that have recently become available, but there will be some goodies for users of prior versions as well.

Universe Models for Recursive Data

Presentation Abstract

Recursive data can present a special challenge to SAP BusinessObjects developers because SQL is not natively able to process the relationships. This presentation will show several different methods for modeling recursive data along with the pros and cons of each. All of the methods shown have been used on real-world projects. Attendees will gain a better understanding of the complexities of dealing with inventory models, organizational hierarchies, and other types of recursive data.

As time allows I will be adding detailed blog posts for each of these presentations. I am cheating a bit this year. 🙂 I have already written two blog posts that detail most of the “Variables” presentation:

• Using ForceMerge() To Fix Unbalanced Data Providers
  This post covers slides 13 through 18 from “Return of the Variables” and was originally released here on my blog back in September.
• Calculating Business Days Between Two Days Via Report Functions
  This post covers slides 19 through 33 of the same presentation and is already written. I need to make a few tweaks and will likely publish it on Friday. Until then the link above won’t seem to be valid, but it should work after the post is published.

That leaves only the initial portion of the presentation to write up, and I hope to have it done fairly soon. The detailed posts for the Designer presentation will take a bit longer.