Glossary

Analytic function

Analytic functions compute an aggregate value based on a group of rows. They differ from aggregate functions in that they return multiple rows for each group. For more information about Oracle9i functions, see Oracle9i SQL Reference or Oracle9i Data Warehousing Guide.

Business area

A business area is a collection of related information in the database. The Discoverer manager works with the different departments in your organization to identify the information that each department requires from the database.

Condition

Conditions are worksheet items that enable you to select what data to display on worksheets. Conditions filter out data that you are not interested in, enabling you to concentrate on data that you want to analyze. For example, you might use a condition to display only data for the month January.

Data Point

Data points are numerical data, such as sales, cost, or profits. There are two kinds of data points:

• detail data points - single values, such as one sale or the cost of one product

• aggregate data points - summary values, such as total profit over a year or quarter

Folder

A folder is a container used to group related information in the Discoverer End User Layer. For example, when using the Discoverer Item Navigator to choose items, you might find information relating to customers in a Customers folder. Folders can also contain other Discoverer items such as calculations, percentages, and totals. For more information, see "Exercise 8: Adding items to the worksheet".

Item

Items are different types of information stored in a folder. For example, if a Products folder contains reference numbers, descriptions, and the price of each product, the items in the Products folder are reference number, description, and price. In a worksheet, items appear as column and row headings.

List of values

A List of values (LOV) is a list of valid values for an item. For example, a LOV for a year item might contain the values 1998, 1999, and 2000.

Page item

A page item is a filtering item located above a worksheet in the Page Items area. Page items enable you to look at one area of information at a time. For example, if an item called Month is placed in the Page Items area, you might select January from the page item drop down list to produce a January report, then select February to produce a February report and so on.

Parameter

Parameters are workbook items that enable Discoverer users to enter dynamic input values used to analyze worksheets. Input values are typically used to:

• provide input to conditions that are used to filter worksheets - for example, when a workbook or worksheet is opened or refreshed, the parameter is used to first ask the worksheet user 'What month do you want to analyze?'. This enables a worksheet to look at data for a single month only (e.g. January).

• provide input to calculations - for example, a worksheet user can enter the value '3' when prompted to enter a banding value. This value is then used to divide data into three bands using a predefined calculation containing a banding function.

Query

A query is a question that Discoverer asks the database in order to get the data that you want to analyze.

Every time you open a worksheet or create a new worksheet, Discoverer sends a query to the database. For example, how did Product A sell last month?

Note: Queries are written in Structured Query Language (SQL), a language that databases understand. You do not need to understand SQL to communicate with the database - Discoverer writes the SQL query for you!

Rank

A rank is the league table position of a particular value in relation to other values. For example, if you calculate the rank of a set of values in ascending order (highest first), the highest value has the rank 1, the second highest value has the rank 2 etc.

The analytic function RANK() calculates the ranking position of each row in a set of rows.

Workbook

Workbooks are Discoverer files that contain worksheets displaying data retrieved from the database.

If you are familiar with spreadsheet applications (e.g. Microsoft Excel), think of a workbook as a spreadsheet file.

Worksheet

Worksheets contain the data that you want to analyze, together with a number of Discoverer components to help you analyze the data. For example, a worksheet can contain parameters, totals, percentages, exceptions, and calculations.

If you are familiar with spreadsheet applications (e.g. Microsoft Excel), think of a workbook as a spreadsheet file and worksheets as different sheets in that spreadsheet file.