Factless Fact table

Factless Fact

A factless fact table is a table that contains nothing but dimensional keys.

There are two kinds of factless fact tables:

• Factless fact table describes event 
• Factless fact table describes condition.

Factless fact table for event

You often find that you want to track events or activities that occurs in your business process but you can’t find measures to track.  In these situations, you can create a transaction-grained fact table that has no facts to describe that events or activities.

Example

For example, you may want to track employee leaves.

At the center of diagram below is the FACT_LEAVE table that has no facts at all. However the FACT_LEAVE table is used to measure employee leave event when it occurs.

The following SQL statement is used to count number of leaves that  and employee has been taken:

Select employee_name as name,count(leave-type_id) as leave from fact_leave ,Dim_employee where fact_leave.employee_id = Dim_employee.employee_id.

Factless fact table for condition:

It is used to support negative analysis report, Factless fact table can be also used in these situations:

For example a store  that  did not sell product for a given period, to make this report you must have a fact table to capture all combinations:

 

Setting Priority Group Numbers for Logical Table Sources

You can set priority group numbers to determine which logical table source should be used for queries for which there is more than one logical table source that can satisfy the requested set of columns.

For Example , A column is mapped to multiple LTS(LTS1 & LTS2)  and you want to give first priority to LTS1 whenever this particular column is being fetched in the report so in this case you can assign a higher priority to LTS1.

To assign priority group numbers, rank your logical table sources in numeric order, with 0 being the highest-priority source and so on.
Assigning priority groups is optional. All logical table sources are set to priority 0 by default.

See below snapshot:

Start on Criteria tab when editing Analysis

In OBIEE 11g when we Edit / Analyze the report by default we land up to Result tab which takes long time for big reports. And it’s time consuming when we doing  R&D in report.

We have option under My Account to change this setting.

 

Go to My Account > Preferences and change  Analysis Editor option to Start on Criteria tab when editing Analysis. See below sanpshot.

 

“The connection has failed” error in OBIEE 11g Admin tool while creating new Repository(.RPD)

If you get “The connection has failed” error while importing database table into repository ,you need to make two changes to make it work:

1. Copy the tnsnames.ora from Oracle Database home (ORACLE_HOME\NETWORK\ADMIN\) to the following locations.
   • \OracleBI1\network\admin (Example: C:\OBI\Oracle_BI1\network\admin)
   • \oracle_common\network\admin (Example: C:\OBI\oracle_common\network\admin)
2. Set the TNS_ADMIN environment variable value with one of the copied locations in the step 1 in user.cmd or user.sh file depending on your OS. This file will be found under \instances\instance1\bifoundation\OracleBIApplication\coreapplication\setup (Example : C:\OBI\instances\instance2\bifoundation\OracleBIApplication\coreapplication\setup)

If Windows OS is installed in you Machine then you need to change the TNS_ADMIN path in user.cmd file and if you have any other operating system installed in your machine then you need to make changes in user.sh file.