Pre-requisites

Follow the Step-by-Step Installation Guide for BI Connector Desktop Edition to install and configure BI Connector on your PC.

Best Practice

Follow these few simple mantras to quickly become an Expert in the report creation for OBIEE data using Tableau and BI Connector.  

1. For your first flow, choose a simple report with one or two measures coming from one Fact table and one or two dimension columns coming from one or more Dimension tables. 
2. As the first step, review the required report in OBIEE in your Dev/Test/Production environment and view the results. Note down the Report names, Fact tables & required measures, Dimension tables & required columns.
3. Next, connect from Tableau Prep Builder using BI Connector to the same environment which has the OBIEE report.  This will ensure that you are able to do an apples-to-apples comparison of data and visualization in Tableau Prep with the same report in OBIEE. 
4. Use filters when appropriate to limit the data being queried by Tableau Prep in OBIEE.

A few things you should not do:

1. Do not select a complex OBIEE report for your first few visualizations. 
2. Do not create a flow by querying the entire report without any filters. This might be an expensive and time consuming query.

Connecting from Tableau to OBIEE Reports

Step 1: Launch Tableau Prep Builder. Select Other Databases(ODBC) from the list of Connectors.  

Step 2: Select the DSN configured for connecting to OBIEE Reports (e.g., OBIEE Report Connector) that you configured using BI Connector in ODBC Data Source Administrator UI. 

Step 3: BI Connector will now connect Tableau Prep Builder to OBIEE Reports. Click on the Database drop-down list to connect to the required database.  

Step 4: Click on Schema drop-down list to view the list of Reports. Select a Report from the list.  

Step 5: In the Table drop-down box, select the Report from the list or search. Search is case-sensitive. Click on the search icon. The list of Reports will be displayed just like a Table. 

Step 6: Drag and drop the Report (Table) to prepare a flow. The columns of the report will be displayed in the pane.

Step 7: Under the Input pane, it shows the Default Data Sample to be included in the flow. By default it selects 'Default Sample Amount'. If you wish to include all of your data for preparation, select the option 'Use all data'. Or, if you wish to specify a particular number of rows to be included, select the option 'Fixed number of rows' and specify the number of rows.

The right side will show the columns present in the report and a sample of 3 values present in the report. You can uncheck any of the columns which you wish to not include in your flow.

Click on Add Step, to add an additional step to the report table. In this step, you can apply filters and create 'Calculated fields'.  

If you wish to add Aggregates to the report, click on Add Step and select Add Aggregate.

Select the fields named GROUP to add under 'Grouped Fields' and the fields named SUM to add under 'Aggregated Fields'.

Step 8(a): Once the data is prepared, we have to add the Output step, to view the prepared data in Tableau Desktop or in Tableau Server.

To view the data in Tableau Desktop, choose Save to file and choose the file format to be saved.

Step 8(b): To publish the prepared data as a data source to the Tableau server, choose Publish as a data source and select the server from the Select a server drop-down list. Sign in to the server and choose the corresponding project to publish as a data source.

You have now successfully prepared your first Tableau flow for OBIEE Reports. Congratulations! 

If you have any questions or issues creating a report, we are just a click away. Contact us at support@biconnector.com or file a ticket at our support portal.