Drill-through Oracle EPM Cloud, Hyperion Planning, Financial Reporting, and Smart View Data with Ease | Drillbridge

Most Drillbridge drill-through reports use the user's dimensional point of view (POV) to generate a SQL query that is then executed against a particular relational database server. However, Drillbridge supports multiple report types. With the forwarding link report, instead of generating a SQL query, Drillbridge generates a link and directs the user to it. This can be used to generate a link that uses elements from the point of view, such as web-based image server software (to drill into PDFs or images).

The MDX report is another type of Drillbridge report that generates and executes an MDX query instead of a SQL query. The results are then shown in a grid to the user. This can be used to provide drill-through to the data in another cube or system that supports MDX. Note that the view of the MDX data will be static and won't support ad hoc operations such as zoom in/pivot.

Drillbridge has support for custom report plugins. Custom report plugins are developed in Java and deployed to the Drillbridge server. Using a custom report plugin allows for the development of new and different report types that can easily leverage the rich token-mapping functionality in Drillbridge. Custom plugins have access to all of the functionality that the three main report types in Drillbridge (SQL Query, Forwarding Link, MDX Query) have.

Drillbridge reports can optionally turn on report caching and paging. Typically, Drillbridge reports run and the entirety of the row output is displayed in a single webpage. It may be advantageous, however, to break the results up so that the user can page through them in groups (such as 10,000 rows to a page). With the result caching feature turned on, this is easily achievable, and does not require alterations to the SQL query (such as sub-selects or row offsets).

Excluded members are specifically defined member names in a report that should be excluded from a SQL query. This functionality allows for preventing the transactions or underlying detail from ever being queried by a user, whether it's the current member they drilled on or a descendant of the member. For example, while it may be fine for a user to see an aggregate "Salaries" member in Essbase, it may be desirable to put Salaries on the Excluded Members list for a given report so that even if it's drilled on, it will not result in the user seeing data for that member.

Relational connections in Drillbridge reports are typically configured with the credentials of a service account that has access to all of the data in a table/view. It's possible, however, to specify (on a report by report basis) that instead of using fixed credentials for the relational database, the user should be prompted for credentials to use.

Drillbridge Plus has an enhanced interface that makes it even easier to modify the properties for each token, with no manual coding required.

Drillbridge Plus can handle drill-through requests from PBCS and even provides support for upper-level drill-through.

Drillbridge Plus provides enhanced and easily activated formatting options, such as the ability to auto-enumerate rows, custom table styling, break tables up into multiple tables, automatically create hyperlinks, and more.

Upper level drill-through is typically achieved by having Drillbridge write a SQL statement that checks against many different values. Some underlying relational database technologies have a limit as to how many items can appear in a single part of a statement (if there is a limit, it's typically 1,000 items). With overflow support, Drillbridge can smartly rewrite the query to break up the list of member names into groups of 1,000 or less, so that the query is still valid.