Tag: Xcelsius

Troubleshooting Long Running Reports

Posted on by EV Technologies

I caught a tweetstream the other day that Diversified Semantic Layer’s friend and past guest, Michael Welter, had a question on diagnosing and solving for long running queries in Web Intelligence (Webi)…at least I think it was Webi. I saw it fly by and really wanted to weigh in, but it got away from me. I did not necessarily see answers to Michael’s question in that time frame, so I wanted to take some things that occurred to me and that I use in my debugging process.

I may be overly sensitive to this topic, now that I think of it. My first employer had a very very large data warehouse (at the time, largest in the world every other month). While full of rich data, it was painfully slow and as a result BusinessObjects was the perceived as slow by the business. Let’s work on that. I’m going to keep this post within the confines of Webi. There may be similar settings and techniques that can apply to Crystal Reports, Xcelsius, Explorer, etc. (even Deski…sorry Jamie).

Xcelsius with BI Services and BW Variables

Posted on by EV Technologies

Over the last few weeks I’ve been working full steam on a project to lay Xcelsius on top of BW (Accelerated no less). One of the cool capabilities of BW to significantly improve performance over standard parameters is to use variables. Variables pass straight through from the BW query and look like a prompt in Webi. The variable is a parameter that gets passed to the BW query before it actually runs vs. being applied to the result set. This can net a significant performance gain.

Xcelsius Hide and Show Chart Series

Posted on by EV Technologies

Interactively hiding and showing series on a chart is something that end users have been asking for as long as I have been working with Xcelsius. In the past, to accomplish this relatively simple task, it required a great deal of acrobatics utilizing dynamic visibility. Now with Xcelsius 5.3.0.0 (SP3) we have a quick and simple way to set this up with built in functionality.

Crystal Reports to XML

Posted on by EV Technologies

2010-08-08 Corrected Formulas below

This will be the first part of a series of blogs that illistrates how to flow data from Excel to Xcelsius using Crystal Reports and XML.

XML (Extensible Markup Language) has had export support from Crystal Reports for quite a while. While the Export to XML option allows for specification of a transform file (XSL/XSLT), another handy export option I value is Export to Text. I’ll get back to that in a second.

SAP Business Objects XI 3.1 SP3 is Here

Posted on by EV Technologies

It’s Christamas in May. SP3 is here. I’ve already nabbed the Enterprise install, client tools, and Live Office for starters. I’m particularly interested to see what the Xcelsius servers are going to do for me.

If you are looking for specifics, check out the SMP note 1456899 for all the associated guides. Enjoy.

Certification for Sherlock is soon to follow I’m sure.

SAP BW vs. A Data Mart – The Great Debate

Posted on by EV Technologies

Today is another one of those days that I feel like a total rookie. I’m afraid this post is really much less of a “here’s how to go do something cool” and really about the future. Like many others out there, I’m being introduced to the big wild world of SAP products outside of the SAP Business Objects stack. I’m a small part of a great big project where I’ll finally have an opportunity to interface in some way to SAP BW. On the one hand, what a great opportunity to learn more and really go deep with this capability. On the other, it’s a little intimidating shifting gears on all those years of history of traditional data warehousing and data marts to report in a new way.