Places for Intelligence

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A universe designer may naturally assume that the universe should contain all the intelligence. Power users may want user objects and report variables to contain all the intelligence. Depending on how much disk space and time a DBA has, the DBA may want the intelligence to be in the table design so that it is tool-independent. This is where a good Program Manager or Project Manager will work with the different stakeholders and determine the best place for intelligence considering a company’s resources, time, and flexibility. Companies can build intelligence into MOLAP cubes, the data warehouse, the universe, or user objects and reports. If you are using BusinessObjects directly against a transaction system, your alternatives may be limited to the universe and reports.

Figure 13-1 shows these different places and where the intelligence gets processed. In Chapter 10, you built an object called Current Year To Date Sales as part of the universe. Stepping through Figure 13-1, you could have used a MOLAP cube to include the time period awareness in the sales column (place 1). The processing is done on the MOLAP server. The intelligence also could be a physical column in an aggregate fact table. The information is preprocessed by the RDBMS, so when a user runs a query, it is a simple fetch (place 2). If the object exists in either the universe or a user object, the RDBMS again does the work but does it upon query execution. The user may wait longer for the query to be processed, but the work is still done by the RDBMS.

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Figure 13-1: Intelligence can be built in a number of places in a BusinessObjects deployment.

If a power user creates a report variable to calculate Current Year To Date Sales, then the RDBMS sends the detail rows to calculate that variable to either the WebI server in a thin-client environment or the user’s desktop in a two- or three-tier environment (full client or ZABO, respectively). In a thin-client environment, the WebI midtier must calculate the variable and present the results to the user in HTML format (place 3). In two- or three-tier environment, all the detail rows travel the network to the desktop PC that then calculates the report variable (place 4).



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Business Objects(c) The Complete Reference
Cisco Field Manual: Catalyst Switch Configuration
ISBN: 72262656
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 206

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