#smart query

Aside from the Sunday symposiums I had 2 great sessions at ODTUG KScope 2013.  Rooms where packed, I saw a bunch of new faces, and there was some great interactivity.

The first session was Leveraging Office and Smart View to Create a Data Entry Experience.  This session took users though the steps necessary for creating advanced input templates for distribution to end users. The templates will included data from multiple sources and the examples shown leveraged new features in Office 2010 and 2013 along with Excel features that have been around for many versions. (charting, functions, sparkline's, outline, and formatting) It touched on the use of VBA to automate common tasks and we will go through some of the challenges of template distribution and maintenance.

Here is a link to the presentation:

http://prezi.com/x4vpbmnu45l6/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

The second was Smart View’s New Features; in this session I talked about all the new features available in the latest versions of Smart View. We will discussed general client features like sheet level options, re-designed function builder, platform support, as well as provider specific features like in-cell Point of View and improved Planning Smart Lists. This session also contained details on, and showed demos of new extensions; most notably the OBI (Oracle Business Intelligence) extension.

Here is a link to the presentation:

http://prezi.com/kvcvhe2qfcrg/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

At Kscope 2012 I did a Hands on Lab about Smart View and I wanted to share the content.  In the lab we connected to AWS servers and followed along; the servers are gone now but you can do the lab with just about any sample applications as I kept it pretty generic.

There are a bunch of great new features in Smart View 11.1.2.2 but I want to start by focusing on my favorite new one; Smart Query.  Smart Query is an new analysis type like ad hoc or forms but Smart Query focuses on ‘set based analysis’.  This is the idea that the query is built of dimensional ‘sets’ that combine to make a data query.  So what does that mean? 

It means an end user can create dimensional queries like ‘top 10 products that contain the letter c and have a margin % > .3’.  This query, when run with various POV’s will yield a different set of members and will vary as data changes.  Smart Query allows the creation of these sets and when combined with a set from each dimension a data grid results.

The above picture shows Top 5 and Bottom 5 products based on sales and will vary as the POV is changed.  It also includes 2 custom members for totals and average for each of the product sets. 

This type of analysis in not as flexible (free form) as ad-hoc but with a click of a button you can switch to ad-hoc and zoom and pivot until your heart is content.