Our Blog

BI Connector v3.7 is released

BI Connector v3.7 is now available. It is packed with powerful new capabilities, usability enhancements, and of course, bug fixes.

What’s New:

QlikSense to OBIEE BI Connector
Manage Reports List
Usability improvements for Tableau Extracts

Introducing QlikSense to OBIEE BI Connector

We are excited to announce the newest member of the BI Connector family. The Qlik to OBIEE BI Connector is designed to help customers modernize their OBIEE environments using QlikSense as the visualization tool. Within a few minutes, users can seamlessly connect from QlikSense server to OBIEE Analysis (Reports) catalog using their OBIEE credentials. BI Connector combines QlikSense’s powerful in-memory visualization capability with OBIEE’s strength in logical(metadata) and security model.

See how the BI Connector compares to other alternative options:

Watch for Qlik to OBIEE Video Tutorials:

If you are interested in evaluating and participating in the early customer program, email us at [email protected].

Manage Reports List

The Manage Report list is a new self-service feature for developers and super users to facilitate easier loading of the reports catalog into Power BI, Tableau or Qlik. Visualization tools can show only 10,000 reports(objects) at a time and OBIEE is extremely inefficient with the catalog queries. The Manage Reports list overcomes these limitations and provides an easy way to offer a governed list of folders/reports available to end users.

The Manage Report feature is used as follows:

Using Manage Report List, super users/developers can provision a list of shared folders or reports to Power BI/Tableau/Qlik for development. The developers can either select existing folders such as /shared/GL or /shared/AR etc. Alternatively, the developer can create a folder called /shared/BI Connector and make this the folder of choice for Power BI.
By checking “Include My Reports folder”, the user’s reports in their personal folders are automatically displayed in Power BI.
Once the report is developed and published to Tableau Server/Power BI Cloud/QlikSense, it is automatically available for other users without any additional configuration.

Watch this video on how to configure OBIEE Reports DSN using BI Connector:

Usability Enhancements for Tableau Extract

Users often find extracting OBIEE data with Tableau challenging and confounding. The issue lies in both Tableau and OBIEE.

Tableau queries for data extract are inefficient when compared to live queries. Extract queries fetch data for all the fields in multiple tables, often hundreds of fields, and fetch all the data which could run into millions of rows. Compare this to live queries which only fetch the required fields and allow you to add filters in an intuitive manner.
Most OBIEE environments cannot handle large data extracts. The maximum amount of data that can be extracted depends upon the hardware configuration of the OBIEE server. In addition, your OBIEE administrators might set limits on the maximum number of rows that can be exported.

Therefore users often see errors or no data when they try to extract from OBIEE Subject Areas. To avoid such errors, users need to limit the amount of data that will be extracted from OBIEE into Tableau. You can do this in two ways:

Limiting the number of columns being extracted,
Using filters to limit the number of rows.

Watch this video to learn the best practices for extracting OBIEE data with Tableau and BI Connector.

BI Connector v3.7 includes enhancements that help users to manage the number of columns being extracted and the number of rows being extracted. By default, BI Connector will restrict queries to a maximum of 25 fields per query. Queries with more than 25 fields will automatically error out with an intuitive error message. Users will be guided to the best practices tutorial that shows how to limit the number of fields using Hide Unused fields feature in Tableau. Users can customize the maximum number of fields in the Settings UI of BI Connector.

In addition, users can use filters in Tableau to restrict the number of rows. Users can also set limits on the maximum number of rows fetched from OBIEE by using OBIEE session variables or in the BI Connector Settings UI. You can learn more about this in this How-to article.