OBI 11g Hierarchy Drill-to and Drill-from Levels – Future Release – Doh!

So, one of the questions I constantly get when teaching, talking, or raving about the integration between Hyperion Essbase and Oracle BI (specifically 11g), aside from the native hierarchy drill-down capability, of course, is can a user drill down to level 0 or drill all the way back up from whence they drilled-down?  They then proceed to talk about how other native Hyperion tools such as Brio, Production Reporting, and the Essbase Excel add-in can clearly achieve this operation with ease.  An example of this would be “expand all levels” or “drill to level 0”.  I of course, must tell them that right now OBI 11g does not have that as a specific feature but it is slated as a future release.  Ideally, I would like to believe that Oracle has this slated for the very next release, though I have not heard anything about that around the campfire.

Why do I believe this functionality will be in the next release?  I’m glad you asked.  If you open the AdminTool for OBI 11g and right click on a subject area (Presentation Layer) you will see a new option called “Generate Drill Graph”.

Unfortunately clicking on this option gives you a rather vague prompt message that doesn’t tell you much of anything.

But if you search in the RPD help menu for this menu option you will see the following text:

“The Drill To Levels and Drill From Levels tabs are reserved for a future release and are not currently used. An additional option called Generate Drill Graph, available as a right-click option for any Presentation layer object, is also reserved for a future release.”

If you right-click > properties on any hierarchy column in the presentation layer you will see that there are two tabs related to drilling: drill-to and drill-from.  The drill-to column is where I suspect this capability will eventually reside.  Right now it seems more like a place holder.  The drill-from simply lists out the level drilling capabilities that are defined in the Business Model dimension levels.

Based on the statement from the Oracle RPD help menu, I hope that this logic does come to exist as it is asked for by a lot of folks.  On top of that I would like to really see that dynamic Web 2.0 functionality in the tool so that it is hands-down the winner of all BI Analytical and Ad-hoc analysis tools on the market.  Cheers to that.

Oracle BI folks correct me if I am wrong.  Or, leave a comment letting us know which release this will be revealed in.

References:

• OBI 11g RPD Help