In today’s technological landscape there’s an ever-accelerating demand for increased efficiency and effectiveness. As organizations evaluate new solutions, they must consider the effective end-user adoption of every technology prior to implementation, particularly as the cost of deployment and training are often driven by the rate of user adoption. So every organization requires a careful evaluation of the tool, as well as its potential for end-user adoption.
To enable all users to tap into the most pertinent data, whenever and wherever they need it, Oracle has introduced, Oracle BI Cloud Service. The new Oracle BI CS is familiar with the users of OBIEE 11g. In some areas, Oracle BICS provides nearly identical features and functionality to Oracle BI EE. These similarities enable users to become more productive more quickly using Oracle BI Cloud Service. That said, you don’t need any special skills/training, just your current OBIEE analyzing and visualizing hands on skills are enough to adopt this new BICS.
What’s new?
Oracle BICS is designed with a fresh, lighter weight UI by integrating a new style called Skyros. It is exciting to see how quickly oracle is enhancing BI capabilities and visualizations components that provide significant graphical and tabular capabilities for analyzing data. In that direction, Oracle BI CS is being modernized and introduced following new features/components (in this V1 release).
Treemap view
Treemaps organize hierarchical data by grouping the data into rectangles (known as tiles). Treemaps display tiles based on the size of one measure and the color of the second measure.
The following figure shows an example of simple treemap view.
It shows the rectangles space filled with the “Size” and “Color” proportional to the “#Leads” across different Lead Sources.
By default, the first measure of the analysis in the Criteria tab is selected as the Size By measure, and the second measure is selected as the Color By measure. If there is only one measure in the analysis, this measure is the default for both Size By and Color By options. Additionally, the Style element defaults to Percentile Binning with “quartile” as the value for the number of bins.
Treemap view has the following characteristics:
- Tiles are colored by percentile binning or continuous color fill.
- First Group By dimension is displayed as the group (header) label.
- The order of the Group By dimensions implies the nesting order within the treemap. The last dimension in the Group By is the lowest level and this dimension name is displayed as the tile label. If the label is too long to fit on the tile, then it is truncated. Full values for the labels display in the tooltip.
Global Variables
In addition to session, Presentation and Request variables, BICS introduces a new variable called Global Variables. A global variable is a column created by combining a specific data type with a value. The value can be a Date, Date and Time, Number, Text, and Time.
You create a global value during the process of creating an analysis by using the Edit Column Formula dialog. The global variable is then saved in the catalog and made available to all other analyses within a specific tenant system.
The global variable is evaluated at the time the analysis is executed, and the value of the global variable is substituted appropriately.
Syntax for calling Global Variables in BICS Analysis:
@{global.variables.variablename}
where variablename is the name of the global variable, for example, gv_region. When referencing a global variable, you must use the fully qualified name as indicated in the example.
For example: @{global.variables.gv_txt_multiply_rev}
Note: Only users with the “BIAdvancedContentAuthor” role can manage (add, edit, and delete) global variables.
Thanks,
Shiva Molabanti
OBIEE by Shiva Molabanti 