BI Publisher Consuming Data Visualization Data
The new March 2019 release of Oracle Analytics Cloud (Version 105.2) has a wide range of new features, from administrative through to general enhancements. In this series of blogs I will look at some of the features and use a worked example to show it in action. The first enhancement that I will consider is the ability for BI Publisher to consume data flows created using Data Visualizer. This is a notable feature as BI Publisher can be used to create ‘pixel perfect’ reports from the results of a data flow which perhaps combines data from Cloud ERP and other sources. I will show a simple example of the end-end process of creating a simple flow and surfacing the data in BIP.
Firstly, let us create a data set to use as an example. I have a simple list of ficticious schools and pupil numbers, just so that we have both attributes and measures.
We can load that into OAC as a dataset and save it as ‘DemoSchools just so we have a clear example for us to use.
Whilst this is a simple data set, DV allows us to perform a lot of data enrichment (something I hope you’re familiar with) and so I can really enhance the data by adding in City, Country and Latitude and Longitude co-ordinates.
I can then create a Data Flow using this data as the source of the flow. To make it more interesting and to prove that the BI Publisher report is actually using the flow, we will add in an additional calculated column by ranking the schools by the number of pupils.
We can save and run the flow and then we can goto ‘Classic Home’ where we can create a BIP Data Model that will consume that data.
So, when the BIP Data Model editor appears we can now select the new data set option by using ‘DV Data’
This will give us a choice of DV Data Sets and now – new in 105.2 – a list of all the DV Data Flows too. Click on Data Flows and we can select the one we want.
Now give it a name and optionally add parameters and then press Finish.
We now have a BIP data model created from a DV Data set.
Let’s have a look at the data in BIP just to prove the connectivity.
That’s all great, so let’s save the BIP datamodel and then create a report based on it.
Once we’ve built the report, let’s run it and we see that BIP is successfully sourcing data from the DV data flow
What a great new addition to OAC!
