Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

Last Time On This Subject…

This is the fourth in my series about dynamic date objects. The first three included objects for daily, weekly, and then monthly ranges. I am going to complete my collection of Oracle-based dynamic date objects by providing yearly objects in this post.
Continue reading “Dynamic Dates Part IV: Yearly Date Ranges”

I finally finished and submitted my presentations (part I and II) this weekend. It is always interesting to me to see how things evolve during the creative process compared to the abstracts, or even compared to my initial ideas. This year I am really happy with the way my presentations turned out; they are going through the review process now. Of course they were due a few weeks ago… 😳

Continue reading “Enter The Ninja”

The Challenge

Both Desktop Intelligence and Web Intelligence provide options to coordinate the placement of one block based on the size of another. This technique is used when you have more than one block on a page and you want the lower blocks to move up and down (or left and right) on the page based on the volume of data shown in the “relative” block. This works quite well with two blocks as shown below.

The block on the left in this case (the blue box) would be the anchor block. The block on the right (the red block) would float relative to the anchor block. I can accomplish this by right-clicking on the floating block and selecting Format Block. The Appearance tab includes the following settings that I can tweak:

This technique works well for a chain of tables either horizontally or vertically. But what if I have the following scenario where I need to float blocks both horizontally and vertically?

Continue reading “Variable Relative Block Positioning”

Last Time On This Subject…

In the first post in this series I introduced the idea of dynamic date objects. The intent was to show how a universe designer can create dynamic date objects that can be used to schedule reports with a condition that changes over time. The first post covered the basic concepts and included “Today” and “Yesterday” dynamic date objects. The next post covered weekly ranges. In this post I will further extend the concept to monthly ranges. As with the other posts so far in this series I will be using Oracle functions.

Continue reading “Dynamic Dates Part III: Monthly Date Ranges”

In earlier post I wrote about being selected as a speaker for the conference again this year. As I generally do I submitted about a half dozen ideas, of which two were accepted. As it turns out, there was an ulterior motive in place. I didn’t get two abstracts selected, but something different altogether.

Continue reading “The Orlando Experiment: Two Part Presentations”

Years ago I made some noises about writing a technical book on Business Objects. I think the first time I seriously considered it was in 1998 after my second successful “variables” presentation at the annual conference. Considered it, yes. Started to write it, no.

Continue reading “What about that book?”