BusinessObjects 4.0-Answers the Query

The Cadillac of 32-bit managed query environments

Anyone familiar with the client/server query and reporting tool marketplacehas heard of BusinessObjects 4.0, a high-end decision support package formanaged query environments. When I talked about managed query environments, Imean that your MIS department will have to establish and map permissions betweendata sources and users to get BusinessObjects working. The payoff, though, iscontrol with a capital C. BusinessObjects lets MIS/IT maintainmainframe-like security, control who can fire off queries and reports (it evenlets you set when your users can log on), and establish boundaryconditions such as the maximum number of rows a query can return.

BusinessObjects 4.0 sets the standard in managed query environments.BusinessObjects lets users do integrated query, reporting, and online analyticalprocessing (OLAP) on data, while developers can design universes (mappeddata structures) of data.

The Evolution of BusinessObjects
BusinessObjects isn't a new kid on the block. Business Objects (the company)began shipping BusinessObjects 1.0 in 1990 and now has more than 4000installations (for a look at one of these installations, see the sidebar, "Medtronic'sParallel Universes," page 102) with 475,000 licenses world-wide. Inaddition to having proven staying power and an increasing revenue stream(estimated 1996 revenues of $85 million are up from $60 million in fiscal year95), Business Objects has more than 450 partners and will offer new links toSAP, Oracle Express, and Arbor Essbase data later this quarter. Microsoft hasasked Business Objects to join its Alliance for Data Warehousing, a selecthandful of vendors that includes ExecuSoft Systems, Informatica, NCR/Teradata,Pilot Software, PLATINUM Technology, Praxis, and SAP. Business Objects' newBusinessMiner product, which began shipping in February, will help launch datamining as a mainstream activity. An international company with dual headquartersin San Jose, California, and Paris, France, Business Objects offers English,French, Spanish, German, and Kanji versions of its products.

I first used BusinessObjects in early 1993 during the heyday ofclient/server developer tools. Back then, I divided these tools into twocategories: high-end query and reporting tools (including BusinessObjects,PowerBuilder, and SQLWindows) and end-user query and reporting tools (includingLotus Approach, Access 1.0, and ReportSmith) that theoretically let users querySQL database servers without MIS intervention. At that time, BusinessObjectswasn't as developer friendly or as easy to use as the competition. It involvedtoo much intrusive prelimi-nary setup for my taste, and the terminology (such as"universes") struck me as, well, strange.

The BusinessObjects of Today
So what is BusinessObjects today? BusinessObjects 4.0, the firstmajor release since July 1994, is a modular set of enterprise tools that supportreporting, querying, OLAP analysis, and data mining. The software doesn't letusers update or otherwise change corporate data; it provides read-only dataaccess.

BusinessObjects 4.0 runs under UNIX (Solaris and SGI IRIS due by the end ofthe first quarter of 1997, and HP-UX and AIX in the first half of 1997) and allversions of Windows. Business Objects will upgrade the Mac OS version ofBusinessObjects 3.1 to 3.2, but the company has no plans to provide native MacOS support for version 4.0. The company will support the Mac version for another18 months, and plans to offer Mac users more up-to-date support once the Webversion of BusinessObjects, code-named Darwin, ships later this year.BusinessObjects competes against products such as Cognos' Impromptu andPowerPlay (BusinessObjects provides a wizard to help you convert Cognosmetadata), IQ Software's IQ/Vision and IQ/Objects, Crystal Reports' InfoSelect,and Brio Technology's BrioQuery Enterprise, brio.web.warehouse, and BrioDecision Support Suite.

BusinessObjects 101
The fundamental construct in BusinessObjects is the universe--abusiness-oriented mapping of the data structures in databases that can representa business unit, an application, a system, or a group of users. For example, auniverse can relate to a department in a company such as marketing oraccounting. Universes play dual roles: They let users define queries, createreports, and analyze data using business terms rather than database table orcolumn names, and they give MIS control over access to enterprise data.Universes are like semantic layers between users and the corporate database,isolating users from the gory details of database structure and SQL.

You define universes with the BusinessObjects Designer module, and youadminister universes with the Supervisor module. The universe consists ofgranular bits of data known as objects (generally fields in databases)and classes that are groups of related objects.

Objects are the most granular components in a universe and areroughly analogous to field-level data in a relational database. Object names canbe the same business terms that users assign to their everyday activities. Forexample, objects for a human resources manager can be Employee Name, Address,Salary, or Bonus, and objects for a financial analyst can be Profit Margin andReturn on Investment. According to Business Objects, a typical universe contains50 to 100 objects, but it can easily contain thousands.

Classes are the logical grouping of objects within a universe. Ingeneral, the name of a class reflects a business concept that conveys thecategory or type of objects. For example, in a universe pertaining to humanresources, one class might be Employees. You can further divide classes intosubclasses. So in the human resources universe, a subclass of the Employeesclass might be Personal Information.

In addition to designing universes, you can define hierarchies anddimensions that predefine what data your users can slice, dice, or drill downinto. Users can access these hierarchies and dimensions and analyze thedata using the optional BusinessObjects Explorer, with its multidimensionaldynamic microcube or OLAP technology. BusinessObjects has also licensed theVisual Basic (VB)-like ReportScript from Mystic River that developers and userscan use to create SQL scripts.

Most users, however, access their universes from the standardBusinessObjects Reporter and either run the canned reports that MIS prepares oruse these reports to help create their own ad hoc reports. The optional DocumentAgent module implements a report server that lets users schedule, process, androute reports--over the Web. (Document Agent's Web support is limited totransmitting HTML reports. The Darwin project will offer a version ofBusinessObjects that lets users perform interactive query, reporting, and OLAPover the Web.)

Business Objects also provides an add-in mining product, BusinessMiner(which began shipping in February) that offers end users the ability to minedata on the desktop using decision trees and rule-induction logic. Offeringusers data mining functionality at this price could represent a realbreakthrough. Another component, BusinessQuery (available since February) is aMicrosoft Excel add-on that lets users generate their reports and manipulatetheir data directly from Excel. Rather than looking at BusinessObjects from adeveloper's point of view, let's see how it looks to the users.

BusinessObjects from the User's Perspective
Most BusinessObjects users access universes in network mode by logging onwith a password and opening a report or report folder (which can containmultiple reports that you select using tabs). However, you can also runBusinessObjects in standalone mode and access local data (such as an .xls or.dbf file).

Users can run existing reports, print them out, and route them via email.Users can also access the drop-down Data menu to look at the raw data or to editthe underlying report query parameters. If users have the BusinessExplorermodule that permits multi-dimensional OLAP analysis, they can access eitherdrill-down or slice-and-dice modes to analyze their data from thedrop-down Analysis menu. Drill-down and slice-and-dice operations rely onpredefined hierarchies and aggregates, such as totals and counts thatBusinessObjects designers or savvy users define.

For multidimensional analysis, BusinessObjects categorizes three types ofobjects--dimension, detail, and measure. Dimensionobjects are the parameters for the analysis; they typically relate to ahierarchy such as geography, product, or time. Detail objects describe adimension but aren't the focus of the analysis. Measure objects convey numericinformation for measuring a dimension object. Dimensions, details, and measuresare all predefined parts of the BusinessObjects universes, and the programshields their implementation from the user.

Users can create new reports and report templates. To create a new report,users must specify which types of data provider (data source) they will use andwhether the report will be based on an existing template (templates typicallycontain a user- or company-defined look and feel, including logos andformatting). The four types of data providers are

BusinessObjects reports aren't set up like standard banded reports. They'remore object oriented than a standard report and contain title, data, and summaryblocks. The data blocks can contain two-dimensional tabular data, crosstabs, orgraphical data (pie, bar, line, area, or scatter charts). BusinessObjects'master/ detail reports are data blocks with subsections. The BusinessObjectsReporter module lets users sort, set up subtotals, and use dozens of built-infunctions such as AVG or MAX. Now that you know a little about how users cancreate, access, and run BusinessObject reports, let's look at how designerscreate BusinessObjects universes.

Designing Universes
BusinessObjects divides its user universe into four categories: designers,who set up the database connectivity and mappings (universes) and distribute themappings to users; supervisors, who set up users, groups, and theBusinessObjects Repository, which contains universe metadata; administrators,who set up and schedule document processing with the optional Document Agent;and users. These four groups can exist in combinations. For example, largeorganizations often have several designers and supervisors who oversee differentuniverses, whereas the database administrator at a small organization is oftenboth the designer and supervisor. Let's look at a simple example thatillustrates what's involved in setting up BusinessObjects universes and users soan end-user can create reports from Microsoft's familiar Access Northwinddatabase.

1. Install a standalone version of BusinessObjects 4.0 under NT. Iinstalled standalone versions on my beta box, which runs NT 3.51, and on aWindows 95 box. The standalone version is convenient for evaluators anddevelopers. Large installations will generally choose to install a master(shared) network version.

2. Launch the Designer module and run the four-step Quick Design Wizard byclicking the Quick Design icon (in the middle of the toolbar), as you see inScreen 1.

3. Click the New Connection button in the Quick Design Wizard to define adatabase link. With standalone versions of BusinessObjects 4.0, you can directlyaccess ASCII, DBF, or XLS files or set up an Open Database Connectivity (ODBC)connection. I set up the ODBC connection and selected an existing ODBC datasource for the Microsoft Access Northwind database. Users can licenseBusinessObjects native drivers for Oracle, Sybase, Informix, DB2, Microsoft SQLServer, or Teradata databases.

4. Set up the BusinessObjects classes by clicking the list of tables orviews, as you see in Screen 2. You can rename them now or later. For thisexample, I selected Northwind's tables--categories, customers, employees,invoices, orders, products, shippers, and suppliers.

5. Set up BusinessObjects measures (aggregates) by clicking on data itemsand the calculation you want to perform. These aggregates (predefined values)can be counts, sums, minima, or maxima. I set up aggregates with counts ofemployees, customers, and orders on a given date, and a sum on invoice totals.Once you've set up your aggregates, BusinessObjects reports how many classes,objects (fields from the tables), and joins now populate your universe.

6. Examine your universe in Designer, as you see in Screen 3. As you cansee from the icon bar, BusinessObjects provides several tools--for everythingfrom adding tables, columns, aliases, classes, and subclasses, to manipulatingjoins and adding conditions to your classes. You can add user-created objectsand update universes to reflect changes in their structure on the server. Afteryou add the final touches to your universe, save it.

7. Run the BusinessObjects Supervisor, as you see in Screen 4. Sign in withthe username General and password Supervisor the first time you log on. Thiscombination of username and password starts the five-step Administration SetupWizard, where you define the general supervisor, create the repository (with itsuser, document, and security domains), and make the repository accessible tousers. I chose to create a default monolithic repository (you can view and savethe script that creates the repository) as an Access database using the sameODBC connection, but you can store the repository in any relational database towhich you have write privileges. The final step is to have BusinessObjectscreate the important BOmain.key file and specify how BusinessObjects willdistribute it to users. When you use the Administration Setup Wizard, you canselect one of three radio buttons to specify the physical destination of theBOmain.key file: on the installation kit (you provide a diskette), in a defaultshared folder, or locally so the supervisor can distribute the file manuallyfrom the LocData folder of the Supervisor folder.

8. Use the BusinessObjects Supervisor to define users, groups, andpermissions.

9. Distribute the universe to users by giving them access to the BOmain.keyfile. You can share personal (local) universes and repository-based universes.

10. Run BusinessObjects Reporter to create reports. Add them to therepository by selecting File, SendTo Repository.

These steps give you a general idea about the process of setting upBusinessObjects universes. Beyond this simple example, you can use all kinds ofoptions including the Document Agent and BusinessMiner (as you see in Screen 5)modules. Make no bones about it, BusinessObjects is a sophisticated, powerfuldecision-support tool from a firm with vision.