Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

I have updated my conference presentations page with links to download my two sessions from BI 2012 conference last month. The two sessions were:

Leveraging Report Variables for More Robust SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence Reporting
This session explores the role of report variables in SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence 4.0 and offers undocumented tips and tricks to exploit them for more creative and efficient ad hoc reporting and data analysis. Walk through system demos to understand what’s required to merge data providers in SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence, including tips to leverage the ForgeMerge() function to fix unbalanced data providers in a full client document. Obtain best practices for using SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence report functions and other context operations to enable calculations at different levels of granularity. Explore workarounds for displaying UserResponse() values on separate rows in a table, and see how this improves the user experience. Get techniques to optimize prompt handling, including insight into whether and how to create a prompt syntax that substitutes “today’s date” for a prompt default value.

The Web Intelligence session was actually delivered with the 3.1 rich client, not 4.0 as mentioned. The conference page lists a number of blog posts related to the content included in that session.

Universe Design Techniques Proven to Boost Front-End Performance
This session dives deep into universe development and examines when, why, and how to tweak your existing Business Objects universes for optimal report performance — and when you may need to build new ones. Explore proven techniques for extending a universe to ensure more efficient queries, an optimized end-user experience, and more timely and efficient BI operations. Acquire tips to perform index awareness, such as choosing a value from the list of values (LOV) directly within the query panel, rather than using prompts. Learn how to use aggregate awareness to set up complex logic and step through a demo to see how this results in significantly improved performance on the front end. Gain insight into whether and when to leverage shortcut joins to boost query speed. Explore universe design techniques that provide the best performance when pointing to a data source outside your Business Objects system. View detailed demonstrations of various advanced universe design techniques and leave with proven strategies for incorporating them into your own environment.

The Designer session included information that I have posted about on my blog before. However, in going through my older posts to build some links to those posts I realized that I’ve never really covered the aggregate awareness feature here. I hope to address that in the next few weeks.