OBIEE METADATA LINEAGE

I will talk about a generic topic today (more from Application Maintenance Perspective). Lets say we have created our RPD and various reports.
How we will track if we have to:
1) Change the source/ formula of a column which is coming in the report.
2) We have made the change in column formula in BMM Layer in the Report. How to identify the impacted Reports
3) There is a physical column in the RPD which has been deleted now. Will this be impacting any reports.
4) Who are the owners or who have the permissions to check any particular report, etc

For questions like above and many more, application owners would like to document a sort of tracker which has details of all of above. We call this metadata lineage or data lineage.

From OBIEE perspective, we keep this lineage at two levels:
1) Catalog Level
2) RPD Level

Catalog Level

To extract all information related to report, its columns, owners, permissions, path, etc. we can use a feature available through catalog manager.
To generate this report, open catalog manager and follow the below steps:

1. Locate the folder in catalog manager whose information is required. To generate this info for entire catalog, one can share the root folder itself.
2. Select Tools > Create Report.

3. In the Create Catalog Report dialog, select the columns that you want to include in the report

4. Click OK
5. Lets save this csv file as CatalogDetails.csv

Repository Level:

All repository objects information can be generated with Repository documentation utility available within OBIEE Administrator tool.
How to use this utility:
1. Open the Oracle BI Administration tool and open the required RPD
2. In the OBIEE Administration tool, select Tools > Utilities.
3. In the Utilities dialog, select the Repository Documentation utility and click Execute

4 Lets save this csv file as RPDDetails.csv

Now a user/ developer/ owner can check these two files back and forth to verify if anything can break due to new changes. I leave to my readers if they want to import back these two files into RPD and play around by creating reports based on our imported metadata lineage.

Till Next Time,
Happy Exploring.