OBIEE Assignment - Designing the Dasboard

BI Dashboard was one of the admiring features of Business Intelligence, during my industrial experience I had a chance to work on the BI Dashboard using Microstrategy but the knowledge was limited to analyzing the data, which was more of sql rather than designing the reports and making dasboard.  With this assignment of making reports and dasboard I got a chance to actually analyze the problem and make effective report to answer some of the business problem.

The methodology our team followed to make report and dasboard was to give the user every flexibility to run the report with parameter he/she wanted, we achieved this by using promts in the OBIEE environment.
The reason I proposed this approach was because of my previous work experience. Since we had the common dasboard the common report for all the business users, the only criteria that was different was the specific details like revenue details for any property, the fact contained all the data for all property, it was just specific users are interested in the data for their own property, so while they ran the report they just enetered the property id for their preorty. Also purposely we allowed multiple selection of time value from the time dimension so the user may analyze the data for any specific time period or for just one year.

The drill down functinalty was the last option that I wanted to implement but could not do it because there was not much of help available at the internet or on the oracle OBIEE documentation, so was not able to do it.

The assignment was a good practice for me in the sense it gave me an opportunity to build reports according to the problem at hand and create a dasboard by visuliazign the data. I was able to bring use of Microstrategy experience while  creating the reports and dasboard and still use the class room teaching to analyze the problem and decide on the KPI.

Regards,
Siddharth gupta

SSIS Tutorial

SSIS tutorial was one of the mind squeezing assignment although not graded, coming from ETL background I knew the assignment will be challenging terms of learning new environment. I was also interested in this assignment as I wanted to test my learning curve for new ETL tool, previously worked on Informatica currently working on IBM Data stage at UITS - Mosaic, SSIS was easy to pick up although there were some cool transformation that I never found or never used during my industrial experience.

Working on different ETL tool, I was able to figure out the most important thing that was also pointed out by our professor Dr. Ram , is to use your knowledge and use it on the problem at hand. Solving the problem is just a trivial task if you know how to use your knowledge ( in this case SSIS transformation ). There will be wide variety of tools that will keep emerging in the market and you mat not be pro in learning all of it, the key is we need to know the underlying concept and then use the technology to accomplish it.

Although the I had to follow up the tutorial for setting up the environment as I was not aware about the SSIS environment, once I had the ETL flow diagram set up in my mind it was pretty much drag and drop of the transformation and changing parameter value.

Nevertheless the SSIS assignment was yet another huge learning curve for me in BI Class this semester after the GOMC prject and OBIEE dashboard. Looking forward to follow MSDN link and learn more about it.

Regards,
Siddharth gupta 

INFOGRAPHIC RESUME

Infographic resume was one of the toughest assignment for this semester in BI class this spring. Although in the class lecture it was looking a good idea to present in form of some picture rather than textual representation but its very tough to select a theme that shows your passion and still be able to convey your skills and achievements.

Finally I decided to make my infographic resume on the theme of a famous Microsoft game called Age of Empire which I used to play in my undergrad, playing games is one of my passion be it on computer on ipad.

Infographic Resume Theme:

Fedual Age

I have tried to portray me resume as a story of a soldier from  Persian Civilization, who over a period of time has gained skills by passing on different stages.
The first being Fedual age, the lowest rank of a solider, i.e when I was in undergrad college at Panjab University.

Castle Age

 As the civilization grows the soldier improves on his rank and becomes much more skillful this is shown in the adjoining image.

Imperial age

Finally when the civilization reaches the imperial age the solider attains the highest level of skill set shown below.




With the idea of gaming I have tried to display in way that suits my passion, I hope you appreciate my resume

What is the difference between Relational and Multidimensional database implementation ?

This was one of my second question on linked in to get a more industrial perspective answer. A lot of discussion on the implementation of relational or multidimensional database implementation. Some of the feedback from experts in this fields are outlined below :

Michel Voogd :
“The difference in implementation is that a multidimensional database includes pre-packaging subsets of data into small objects that are usable for fast online browsing, usually in a BI portal environment such as Cognos or Business Objects.
A relational database in itself doesn't include those packages but it would allow querying larger datasets.”

Bala Seetharaman :
“Relational DB - ER Modeling it has to comply the Codd's 12 rules. Here you can store only the way supported by DB engine (you can partition or multifile groups)
Multidimensional DB - Dimensional model - store the pre-aggregated data in the multidimensional form, still data sourced from Relational DB or Flat files. (Here you can store in the form of MOLAP, ROLAP and HOLAP and DOLAP too).

SQL - Query language used to search and manipulate the data from Relational DB
MDX - Multidimensional Query Expression - used to search and retrieve the data from cube or MDB (Multidimensional) store.

Siddharth: To answer your question "are there is any different tool or language to query the multidimensional database ( CUBE )",
MDX is the query language used to query the cube like your SQL again, its not like your ANSI standard SQL, we need to write in the form of 3D axis.

the calculations are quite easy in RDB than MDB, here if don't understand the dimension and hierarchy members we can't get the result easily in cube. “
John McKenna :
“….In relational databases data is organized by tables and columns (tuples) and records are grouped into blocks for storage and access. Querying is performed based upon relational algerbra (SQL). In multi-dimensional database implementations (most no longer exist), data is organized into mulit-dimensional cubes (think multi dimensional arrays), and queried based on a language suitable to navigating cubes (I am not aware of a standard although one may exist). To further muddy the waters you have columnar databases that group column data into blocks (efficient for ROLAP applications where few columns are in the result set, therefore less blocks traversed).

In addition to the database implementations many reporting tools have (OLAP/cube) functionality built in but many of these are not full blown multi-dimensional databases but scaled bown persistance engines that store all cube values together. Most full blown multi-dimensional databases have faded away due to performance issues (due to sparcity issues, etc), learning new query languages, supporting multiple database platforms and people finding that it was relatively easy to implement cubes in relational databases (ROLAP) by using dimensional database design (Ralph Kimball). …….”


The next question was the query methodology to query both type of database implementation, luckily I came to know that Oracle has also implemented multidimensional database architecture called the ESSBASE and for SQL Server its SSAS and SSRS.

Well there is still lot of information on my profile if you may want to have a look. Compiling all the notes is actually a tedious job. I have tried to aggregate some of the valuable comments.

For detailed discussion please follow the link