I have recently used BI Answers for analytics reporting in OBIEE, however I have heard about BI publisher as well. I am new to reporting hence kindly bear with me for my basic queries around this. May I know the difference between these 2.
Thanking you in anticipation
BIP = pixel perfect reporting. Static, but you can control - as the definiton implies - every pixel. So it's geared towards static output like printing, financial report etc. https://www.oracle.com/middleware/technologies/bi-publisher.html
Answers is one of the on-the-fly, self-service/expert-level construction and dynmic anayltical tools of the Oracle Analytics platform. End-users and experts can use it and it's fully dynamic for changes in scope, point of view, security, etc etc.
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I have been working for a while now but because of my earlier habits i never worked systematically.
I have never created a workflow chart for my software as how the software will work and instead of that i started working directly which in turn leads to many problems later.
Below is a small situation i currently need help with:-
NOTE:I have already created a software which does the following and i don't need any code for it, i just want to know how a workflow chart is created for such a situation.
1) Party List : This is where i would like to store all of the information of my customer.
2) Sales : Here i will sell my products to the customer.
There are 2 cases here, whenever the customer arrives we have an option to
either save it in the party list and select it from the list in the sales form
or type it manually and then save it
Now comes the checking part:-
If an entry was saved in Sales when the checkbox was ticked and the user selected a party, lets say "Akhmed" has been saved AND the user tries to delete the record of "Akhmed" from the Party List form then the software shouldn't allow it to do so as the entry of "Akhmed" already exist in Sales.
Can anyone show me how a workflow chart is created for such a situation?
EDIT
Here is a sample workflow i have made after reading some articles, please point out any improvements that can be made to it or is it completely wrong or anything.
First of all, great question. I wish all software engineers thought first before jumping to writing a code. Especially when it's about anything more serious than a couple of lines for fun.
I think your software flow can be expressed as Activity diagram. An example of activity diagram is expressed on this picture: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/uml/images/uml_activity_diagram.jpg
Basically, activity diagram is a combination of steps and transitions (arrows) connecting them. Step can be just something that happens in the flow, or it can be a logical operator (decision) which branches the flow execution into different directions.
If you need to also emphasize who needs to execute the step, besides just showing what the steps are, you can add swimlanes (horizontal or vertical columns showing the actor names) to the activity diagram. That's where it turns into a Flow Chart diagram. e.g. on this image you can see horizontal swimplanes explaining who does the step execution http://static1.creately.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Support-Process-Flowchart-Template-1024x613.png
Note that terminology can differ from person to person, but these are the names for these 2 kinds of diagrams I have mostly heard and used myself.
There are other kinds of diagrams too, but I think your specific case will be covered with the ones mentioned above. Although... use case diagram can be something you may be interested in, but that does not depict steps. That only will mention actors and what kind of actions they can do with your system. e.g. https://sourcemaking.com/files/sm/images/uml/img_32.jpg
You didn't ask for tools, but I usually prefer to use tools that are rigor (rather than loose like Visio), so I would recommend to use WhiteStarUML. It's free and does a great job. But as I said, it's strictly UML-based, so will require some familiarity with UML.
Finally, about your attached picture:
What you showed looks like an activity diagram with some illegal components on it (illegal from UML specification standpoint). Is it good or bad? - depends. If it's supposed to be a rigor UML diagram then it's bad. If it's just a sketch of an idea - not bad.
Your diagram mentions database sign (called "DB") and arrows connecting to it. That's illegal on an activity diagram UML. Instead, you can have a step which says "Data gets saved to Database", and remove the "DB". Also, you have a single step which says both "Party" and "Sales" on it - that's not a legal UML. I think you tried to express that there are 2 flows. In that case, just have 2 different activity diagrams instead of one.
Your question is quite broad but I'll give it a shot.
I think you want to reconsider your approach. I would suggest reading up on UML sequence diagrams. They are a kind of diagram that provides a way to represent how requests are made within code. UML, in general, can also be used to make class diagrams and other useful flow-like charts for representing code. Many tools, such as visual-paradigm, allow you to build UML diagrams (ex. class diagrams)that can be converted directly into code. This can be useful when getting you started on the program. There is a learning curve with using these tools as different kinds of arrows mean different things, but they can be very powerful. they can also be used to take existing code and convert it to a diagram, which is great when trying to explain how your program works.
here are some other links that might be useful:
lucidchart has an example of a pop-up window diagram like the one you described.
draw.io just allows for you to make the diagrams, not convert them to code, but it is an easy to use tool and integrates with google drive and git hub.
stackoverflow has some info on UML too.
If you are looking for a "professional workflow diagram" UML if a fine way to go, there are many ways they can be laid out and they can be quite professional, I learned about them in school and have used them at work to help plan out the flow of data through our system. There are many more UML tools out there, it might be worth looking into a tutorial to find what's best for you.
You seem to be on the right track, I have never added a database to my flow-charts but it is up to you on how detailed you want to get. You seem to be using the correct symbols!
Here is an awesome, free website that I use. https://www.draw.io/ it was created for making flow charts and other things.
I personally would remove the UI at the beginning of your chart. Try to stay away from the overly technical examples when starting out with flow-charts, hit up YouTube or Google images for some simple, but correct examples.
Good luck friend!
I have a usecase. I want to Integrate / Transform data from different / disparate sources without storing it. Data sources are database(oracle,db2,etc), Webservice(Rest/Soap), Flat files(CSV, XML, JSON), MQ dumps, mainframe systems. I want to pull data from these sources and do some kind of intelligent transformation and integration and provide it our customers. It looks like typical ETL scenario, but my situation is different. I am not allowed to store the data given by the desperate sources, that means, for simple example, i pull data from oracle, soap and a rest, and do all my intelligent transformations and integrations on the fly.
I browsed through google and technical stuffs but could not get convincing solution to my problem.
If you guys can help me giving some valuable insight on this problem and give suggestion and probable approaches to it.
Note: Data size from these sources can sometime be really huge.
Thanks in Advance
Take a look at htto://teiid.org
Thst is exactly what it does, and it is Open Source.
Talend Open Studio y a great solution as well, I'm using it and it's great and easy to make the ETL workflow.
https://www.talend.com/products/data-integration/data-integration-manuals-release-notes/
You can see a lot of help videos: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=talend+studio
I am not a DBA. However, I work on a web application that lives entirely in an Oracle database (Yes, it uses PL/SQL procedures to write HTML to clobs and then vomits the clob at your browser. No, it wasn't my idea. Yes, I'll wait while you go cry.).
We're having some performance issues, and I've been assigned to find some bottlenecks and remove them. How do I go about measuring Oracle performance and finding these bottlenecks? Our unhelpful sysadmin says that Grid Control wasn't helpful, and that he had to rely on "his experience" and queries against the data dictionary and "v$" views.
I'd like to run some tests against my local Oracle instance and see if I can replicate the problems he found so I can make sure my changes are actually improving things. Could someone please point me in the direction of learning how to do this?
Not too surprising there are entire books written on this topic.
Really what you need to do is divide and conquer.
First thing is to just ask yourself some standard common sense questions. Has performance slowly degraded or was there a big drop in performance recently is an example.
After the obvious a good starting point for you would be to narrow down where to spend your time - top queries is a decent start for you. This will give you particular queries which run for a long time.
If you know specifically what screens in you front-end are slow and you know what stored procedures go with that, I'd put some logging. Simple DBMS_OUTPUT.put_lines with some wall clock information at key points. Then I'd run those interactively in SQLNavigator to see what part of the stored procedure is going slow.
Once you start narrowing it down you can look to evaluate why a particular query is going slow. EXPLAIN_PLAN will be your best friend to start with.
It can be overwhelming to analyze database performance with Grid Control, and I would suggest starting with the simplier AWR report - you can find the scripts to generate them in $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/admin on the db host. This report will rank the SQL seen in the database by various categories (e.g. CPU time, disk i/o, elapsed time) and give you an idea where the bottlenecks are on the database side.
One advantage of the AWR report is that it is a SQL*Plus script and can be run from any client - it will spool HTML or text files to your client.
edit:
There's a package called DBMS_PROFILER that lets you do what you want, I think. I found out my IDE will profile PL/SQL code as I would guess many other IDE's do. They probably use this package.
http://www.dba-oracle.com/t_dbms_profiler.htm
http://www.databasejournal.com/features/oracle/article.php/2197231/Oracles-DBMSPROFILER-PLSQL-Performance-Tuning.htm
edit 2:
I just tried the Profiler out in PL/SQL Developer. It creates a report on the total time and occurrences of snippets of code during runtime and gives code location as unit name and line number.
original:
I'm in the same boat as you, as far as the crazy PL/SQL generated pages go.
I work in a small office with no programmer particularly versed in advanced features of Oracle. We don't have any established methods of measuring and improving performance. But the best bet I'd guess is to try out different PL/SQL IDE's.
I use PL/SQL Developer by Allaround Automations. It's got a testing functionality that lets you debug your PL/SQL code and that may have some benchmarking feature I haven't used yet.
Hope you find a better answer. I'd like to know too. :)
"I work on a web application that
lives entirely in an Oracle database
(Yes, it uses PL/SQL procedures to
write HTML to clobs and then vomits
the clob at your browser"
Is it the Apex product ? That's the web application environment now included as standard part of the Oracle database (although technically it doesn't spit out CLOBs).
If so there is a whole bunch of instrumentation already built in to the product/environment (eg it keeps a rolling two-week history of activity).
I'm in the process of developling various applications for whom the end users are both engineers and salesman. Some of the operations and options may not be immediately obvious to all users. All applications are delivered with a PDF and paper manual - but of course nobody reads them!
I would like to improve the usability of the applications by including dynamic context sensitive help. One option would be alá MSDN and have F1 call up a web page - however internet access will not always be available and even this will be too much effort for some.
Another idea is to have descriptions pop up when an option is hovered over - like a tooltip.
I'm interested in other peoples views on this and what are best practices in this situation. Along a similar theme to this post What are common UI misconceptions and annoyances? I'd like to start a discussion regarding these two points:
What would be the best way to go about it?
What help features in existing applications you use either delight or annoy you..?
In my experience nobody but programmers reads the help. So when you have a technical and non-technical target audience you end up providing 2 ways of doing everything:
A Wizard with a few options.
A property editor with lots of options.
In either case, pictures are usually better than words for documentation. So a screenshot or 3 with big green arrows and circles calling out what does what will go a lot further than an indexing, exhaustive help file.
In my experience it would be very helpful to have a tooltip on each option that provides a little more definition/clarity for each option. Additionally, you can improve usability by having the default screen contain a few common, simple options and providing an advanced section that provides more control.
I'm currently working on a similar side-project. We have an existing product that's used by people as part of their day job. There is an inherent learning curve on the product, so users receive some degree of training and have people they can turn to for assistance. Even so, we know it needs more help and user documentation in general.
We are starting this help enhancement project by running a quick survey on the end users, (offering a prize draw as an incentive). We will also speak to the support staff who have to deal with help requests. This will uncover some of the pain points, and will give us a clear idea of how to focus our time & resources.
Guidelines on when to use inline tips vs tool tips etc can be found in various style guides, e.g. here:
http://developers.sun.com/docs/web-app-guidelines/uispec4_0/11-help.htm
Bear in mind that it's probably a bad idea to just copy & paste the text from your existing manuals into contextual help tips. You're going to need help writing completely new content. See if you can get some time from a technical writer / copywriter.
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I work for a CMMI level 5 certified company and one thing I hate about is the amount of documents we prepare (As a programmer I already hate documents). We have lots and lots of documents like PID(project initiation doc), Business requirements, System requirements,tech spec, Code review checklist, issue logs, Defect logs, Configuration management plan, Configuration management check list(s), Release documents and lots...
Almost 90% of these docs are just done for the sake of QA audit :) .. What do you think are the most important documents for a project? What documents can be used in the long run by another developer?
Please share your good practices here. I would like to use them for my own projects or the company I am planning to start in the long run.
Thanks
The key document is a good functional spec. There should be one and only one reference document for a system.
Overdoing documentation proliferates a large number of small requirements and spec documents every time someone changes a system or interface. For a system of any complexity, before long you have your spec distributed around several hundred assorted word, excel, visio and even powerpoint files. When this happens you lose clarity about what is current or even whether you have located and identified all pertinent documentation.
The BRD-SRD-Tech spec progression is based on an assumption that the business signs off the BRD, a business analyst signs off the SRD against requirements documented in the BRD and the technical specification is signed off against the SRD. This generates a web of sign-offs, multiple documents with redundant information and makes it difficult and clumsy to keep the spec documents up to date.
Because of this, subsequent requirements documentatation tends to take the form of a series of change request and supplemental requirement and spec docs, each with their own sign-off and audit process. You gain CYA and audit trail (or at least the appearance of an audit trail), but you lose clarity. There is now no definitive reference document for the system and it is difficult to establish what is current or relevant to any particular activity. The net result is that your business analysis process gets bogged down in forensic research, which adds overheads and latency to delivery schedules.
A spec document should be built in such a way that there is one definitive reference for any given system or subsystem. The document should be kept up to date and versioned. Get a good technical documentation tool like Framemaker, so your process can scale, and the document has some structural integrity of the sort lacking on Word.
For me the only real document I ever use is a spec. The more detail the better. However it doesnt need to be all completed at one time, and it doesnt need to be particularly formal. What is far more useful to me than documents that are checked and signed and double checked and double signed is always being able to get the latest version of a document. And being able to talk to people about what they have written, and get a decision in the case of any ambiguity. this is far more useful to me than anything else.
To sum up: a spec is the only document I have ever found useful, however it pales in comparison to having a project manager who knows the proposed system inside out, and can make sensible decisions based on what they know.
Documentation is like tofu -- most people hate it until they realize that under the right conditions, it can be really good.
The problem is that what you consider documentation is mostly made for documentation's sake. You, as a developer, don't see any immediate value in the documents you produce because you know you can do your job without all the TPS reports which you're required to make.
Unfortunately, I'm going to wager that there's not a lot you can do about in a company where you're being forced to eat raw tofu all the time. You'll probably just have to suck it up and write the docs which your company requires, but you can at least do one thing... you can write documents which at least are useful to you, and you can pass them along with your code for others who will maintain it.
Aside from inline documentation, you could set up a wiki to be used by yourself and people on your team. This type of documentation is searchable, which is already a big plus to developers, plus it's more of a living document instead of a homework-like paper you had to write. You already post to SO, so just think of your documentation as pooling your knowledge in a more useful place.
What do you think are the most important documents for a project?
Different people have different needs: for example the documents which the owner needs (e.g. the business contract) aren't the same as the documents which QA needs.
What documents can be used in the long run by another developer?
IMO the most important document (except for the source code) is the functional specification: because what the software is supposed to do (as opposed to, what it is doing) is the one thing that can't necessarily be reverse-engineered. See also How does a good developer keep from creating code with a low bus hit factor?
User Stories, burndown chart, code
I'm a fan of the old 4+1 views:
Use Case view (a/k/a user stories). There are several forms: proper use cases, forward-looking use cases that aren't as well defined and epics which need to be decomposed.
Logical view. The "static" view. UML Class diagrams and the like work well here as a design document. This also includes request and response formats for various protocols. Here is where we document the RESTful requests and responses. This includes the REST URI design.
Process view. The "dynamic" view. UML activity diagrams, sequence diagrams and statecharts and the like for here for design documents. In some cases, simple narratives work well. In other cases, there's a State design pattern, and it requires a combination of class diagrams and statecharts to show how the stateful objects interact.
This also includes protocols (e.g. REST). Here is where we define any special processing for the various REST requests.
This also includes an authentication or authorization rules, and any other cross-cutting aspects like security, logging, etc.
Component view. The pieces we're building for deployment. This includes the stuff we depend on, the structure of the modules and packages, etc. This is often a simple component diagram or a list of components and their dependencies.
Deployment view. We try to generate this from the code as deployed. Since we're using Python, we use epydoc to create the API documentation. We also use Sphinx to import module documentation into this view of the software.
This also includes the parameters, settings, and configuration details.
This, however, isn't sufficient.
When projects start, you have to work up to this through a series of sprints.
The first sprints build just the use case view.
Subsequent sprints build an "architecture" to implement the use cases. The architecture document has 4+1 views, but at a high level of abstraction. It summarizes the structure of the model schemas, the requests and replies, the RESTful processing, other processing, the expected componentry, etc. It never has a Deployment view. We generally reference operator guide and API documents as the deployment view of an architecture.
Then design-and-construction sprints build (and update) detailed 4+1 view documents for various components.
Then release sprints build (and update) the deployment views.
From the project point of view, the most important documents are those that normally include the word Plan, such as the Project Plan, Configuration Management Plan, Quality Plan, etc.
What you are describing is common in process improvements, and normally responds to two major causes. One is that the system really is overeaching and getting in the way of real work being done. Another is actually answered in your question: it is not that the documents are only done for the sake of audits, and your focus should not just be how usefull is the doc for other developers, but for the project or the company as a whole.
One usually looks at things from it's own perspective, sometimes it's necessary to look at the general picture.