Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Drill-down in Xcelsius using BI Services and Webi

BI Services allows you to publish a Web Intelligence report block as a web service. You can then consume this web service in Dashboard Design (formerly Xcelsius) to display the data in your dashboard. For many purposes, this can be used as a replacement for Live Office.

So, why not just use Query as a Web Service? Good question. If QaaWS service suits your needs, then use QaaWS, but in my opinion there a two big benefits to using BI Services over QaaWS:
  1. You can apply logic and aggregation to transform your raw data into a more usable data set, better matched for the intended use in your dashboard.
  2. You can schedule the Webi report, so that when you open your dashboard, data is being fetched from the Webi cube, not directly from your data source, providing faster load times.


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