Basic Report Development

The first step, and the most important, is planning your report. Determine the need for the report, the content that should be included in the report, how the report will be used, and when and where the users will access the report. Depending on the business environment you find yourself in, this step may require seemingly endless meetings with users, stakeholders, and management. If you are fortunate, the answers to these questions are blatantly obvious and do not require a committee to determine.

To begin building a report, you will access the Reports tab and click the Design Analysis link. This opens the Oracle On Demand Answers application in a new browser window. From this Getting Started window (Figure 2-1), you will select the subject area that you will build your report on. There are two sets of subject areas available here. Those on the left are the Analytics subject areas. These are tied to the Oracle CRM On Demand data warehouse and are considered historical subject areas because the data in reports built on these subject areas is current as of the last Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) process. The ETL is run nightly, so data could be up to 24 hours old.