Re: Is Discoverer a viable tool for Star Schema?

Create an item class on Customer and use the "drill to detail" function when looking at the Sales by Customer report to get to Orders for that customer. This is a dynamic way of getting the same information. However, if the Sales & Orders by Time and Customer is a really useful report, it deserves its own Custom folder. Access to useful information by the end-user is the goal. With Discoverer you have to be smart in the administrative tool to allow ease of use in the end-user environment.

slater_at_rpi.edu wrote in message <7uflnf$qmm$1_at_nnrp1.deja.com>...
>I'm trying to implement Oracle Discoverer against a Star Schema design.
>I'm not finding any way to implement ad-hoc Data Mart-type queries
>using the tool.
>
>This comes up when trying to query multiple fact tables and group on
>dimensions, which is a very basic and useful type of query. For
>example, if I have the following:
>
>Time as dimension
>Customer as dimension
>Sales, Orders as facts.
>
>Let's say I want to see Sales & Orders by Time and Customer on a
>report.
>
>This can't be done with a single SQL statement -- joining the fact
>tables is a hugely inefficient way to go, especially since you might
>have a customer that has orders but no sales for a day, so you'd have
>to do a double outer join.
>
>Using SQL I would perform two queries and union the results together.
>
>But in Discoverer, the only suggestion I've seen is to create a
>Custom Folder and use the above union SQL as the basis for it. Which
>works, but this is not ad-hoc -- for every query of this type I'd have
>to have a custom folder. That's very static.
>
>I've used a product called Business Objects which recognized that this
>type of query is from two fact tables (using contexts, for those of you
>familiar with Bus Obj), and performed two separate queries and sort-
>merged the results back on the PC. It worked superbly.
>
>This is a very basic Data Warehouse type query -- it is what makes a
>data warehouse so powerful, the ability to get related information
>about the dimensions quickly and easily.
>
>Can it be true that Oracle Discoverer, which is highly touted by Oracle
>as an ad-hoc data warehouse tool for Star Schemas, does not really
>handle these types of queries well?
>
>Any help would be appreciated. I'd love someone to prove me wrong
>because Discoverer is the only tool I have to work with (for now...)
>
>
>
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>Before you buy.
Received on Fri Oct 22 1999 - 05:59:28 CEST