Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

I think it’s probably a safe bet to suggest that just about every data warehouse (or even transactional system) has some sort of calendar table. In many cases, the unique key for this table might be the natural key of the date itself, or perhaps it’s a system-generated surrogate key. That doesn’t really matter for this post. What I want to do is show one idea of how I used an OLAP aggregate function called row_number() to extend my calendar functionality, and make it really easy to schedule reports for the “last three months” given an input date. Continue reading “Using OLAP Functions to Extend Calendar Capabilities”

One of the things that I really wish SAP had left alone during the rewrite of Web Intelligence between XI 3 and BI4 is the merging interface. The way you merged dimensions in XI 3.x was brilliant, and gave the report developer an excellent interface to use to manage their merged dimensions. In BI 4 for some reason it looks like they took their design ideas from Desktop Intelligence instead. I was reminded of this today when I tried to “unmerge” (demerge?) two dimension objects in BI4. Continue reading “Unmerging Dimensions in Web Intelligence”