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Message Posted: Sat, 12 Jan 2008 @ 20:55:17 GMT

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Hi Everyone,

I just recently found out that BI developers at my site spend a seemingly painful amount of time renaming fields in their BI tools. The sad thing is, our data architecture team is really good about applying useful titles to tables that are usually exactly what the BI teams want to be using.

For example, when a BI developer imports the definition of a table or view into their tool, it might have a column named TEL_NBR. The BI developers are manually changing the display name of the column to "Telephone Number", when the title on the column on the underlying table is already "Telephone Number".

I suspect they also have trouble importing object / column comments in some tools.

1. Is anyone working with any BI teams that are able to import column titles & comments into Business Objects, Siebel Analytics (Oracle BI), or MS SQL Server Analysis Services? Or any other BI Tools? (Cognos, Hyperion, etc) Could you briefly describe what the experience is like? Does the tool basically do this type of thing automatically for you, or do you know some connection or application settings had to be changed to make the right thing hapen?

2. Have you had success importing _title_ metadata from views? Any clever tricks here? Since we automatically generate views, I'm thinking of suggesting a customer start applying title metadata to view definitions:

     REPLACE VIEW SomeView (
        COL_NM
     ) AS
     SELECT
        COL_NM (TITLE 'Column Name')
     FROM
        SomeTable
     ;

[ although I know titles "applied" to views in such a way will never show up in the data dictionary ... ]

Anyone's thoughts on these topics would be appreciated.

Thanks,

- Chris Stephens

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