Oracle Discoverer help required

[parbhani]

Hi all ,

I could not find a special forum for Discoverer is I am putting this in the Reports forum.

I am using Discoverer 4.1 with Oracle 8.1.7 .
Actually I am a starter with Disco and totally confused with the cobcept of Hierarchy and Joins.

Can somebody explain me in practical words what is the meaning and use of Hierarchy and Join in Discoverer ??

Thanks and Regards

 

[nagornyi]

Joins are essentially the same as joins in SQL and reporting. They define how the folders (which are mostly the same as tables) in a business area to be connected. Let’s say we need to analyze how the organization’s profit depends on the geography of its customers. We have two tables: SALES and CUSTOMER. The SALES table keeps information on each sale event, including Profit and CustomerID. The CUSTOMER table has detailed information on customers, including their addresses and, of course, CustomerID. You join these tables by CustomerID in your business area to make Profit analyzable by customer geography.

Hierarchy serves to tell Discoverer what is logically correct order to aggregate data and to drill in and out. For example, if Customer table has fields like Country, State, City, you may want to be able see the profit by country, then drill down to state, then drill down to city. To be able to do that when designing worksheets in Discoverer Desktop, you have to create in the business area hierarchy Country->State->City. It looks simple, but without the hierarchy there is no way for Discoverer to know that Country has logical precedence over City, etc, because in the Customer table those fields are on the same level.