Oracle Product Suites

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Portal Data At Our Fingertips!
Session 36746
Gail McGarry MacAulay Tara Morgan Florida Fish
Wildlife Conservation Commission Florida Marine
Research Institute
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Todays Presentation

• A little bit of background
• Anatomy of our Data Portal
• Well dissect our portal and show you how
  easy it was to create some of these elements
  using Portal Wizards.
• Future directions

http//floridamarine.org
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Florida Fish Wildlife Conservation Commission
FLORIDA MARINE RESEARCH INSTITUTE
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FL Fish Wildlife Conservation
CommissionsFlorida Marine Research Institute

• Conduct scientific research relating to Floridas
  marine resources
• Provide research results to enhance management of
  Floridas marine resources

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Computer Configuration
Oracle Database Server Dell Power Edge
6400 Windows 2000 Advanced Server 3.6 gb RAM
Oracle Database Server Dell Power Edge
6450 Windows NT SP 4 4 gb RAM 9iAS Infrastructure
Oracle Application Server Dell Power Edge
2550 Windows 2000 5.0 SP 2 2.3 gb RAM 9iAS
Mid-tier
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Our Data Portal Concept

• Make data and info accessible to staff
• Coordinate and promote accessibility of data for
  all Programs and Assets
• Facilitate use of cross-cutting applications
• Encourage value-added use of data
• Continue to develop metadata library

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FMRIs Portal ...

• Built on Oracles 9i Application Server
• Developed for FMRI staff (Intranet)
• Designed to provide access to FMRI data and other
  resources
• Currently being tested by a limited number of
  staff

http//floridamarine.org
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ANATOMY OF OUR DATA PORTAL
Lets dissect our Portal into different
regions, for discussion purposes
1. Data Portal Header
2. Where do you want to go? pane
3. Lets go get data pane
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Data Portal Header Pane
-- Incorporating images and URL links
Create individual portlets with Items regions,
add items, and then edit the item attributes.
Its that easy !!!
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Lets move on to our second pane --
the Where Do You Want To Go? pane
This pane was created using the Menu Wizard in
the Oracle9iAS Portal Navigator page.
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Using the Menu Wizard
Using the Menu Wizard, you can easily set up a
list of URL links and quickly customize the look
by adding icons and altering the font.
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When you add your new menu item in a portlet, the
links are ready to go!
Lets test the Rules Regs link.
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That link connects to the Florida Administrative
Code page.
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Lets move on to our third pane
the Lets go get data pane
This pane features the following tabs Queries
retrieves data from our commercial fish landings
Oracle db. Reports generates landings summary
reports Links to M/S Access a Discoverer
portlet Resources contains items useful to our
staff
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Our Queries tab features forms, charts, and
lists of values that were all created using the
Portal Wizards Really!
CHART
LIST OF VALUES
FORM
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This master-detail form queries two tables from
our Oracle 9i database. It was created using
Portal Forms Wizard.
Instructional text was entered in the Header
Text box when the form was created.
The user enters the year and species number, then
clicks on Query to retrieve data from our
commercial fish landings database. Note The
Query button disappears when the data are
retrieved!
Data from two tables are retrieved.
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This chart displays annual landings weight
summaries from our Oracle 9i database. It was
created using the Portal Chart Wizard.
We created a dynamic List of Values (using the
Portal LOV Wizard) and incorporated it into our
chart to help select the species name.
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Using the Portal Forms Wizard
Youll want to label cryptic fields so that they
make sense to your user.
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The Reports tab retrieves data from views in
our Oracle 9i database. Reports were created
using the Portal Reports Wizard.
The user clicks on a summary, and a new window
pops up to display the report.
In the Wizard, we selected the Reports from SQL
Query option and used a database link to access
views containing the landings summaries.
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The Links to M/S Access tab is an Oracle
Discoverer portlet that retrieves
workbooks/worksheets created from our Microsoft
Access data sets.
In the worksheet, the user can decide whether to
display the data by location or date.
The user can select the date.
Clicking on View Worksheet displays the
worksheet information in a new window.
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Using Discoverer in your portal
A cool feature of Discoverer is that you can
export worksheets to various output formats.
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If the user prefers not to view the prepared
workbooks, they can design their own queries in
Discoverer!
Clicking on Ad-hoc Queries launches the Oracle
Discoverer Wizard to create new workbooks.
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Using the Discoverer Wizard to Query Data
In this example, the user queries the manatee
carcass and red tide location data sets to see if
there are any co-occurrences. The query was
written from the manatee researchers perspective
--using the carcass location as the linked item.
Query Result
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Getting all of this to work was a little tricky
Lets walk through the general steps that we
followed to connect to the Access databases, get
started in Discoverer, and then bring Discoverer
into Portal as a portlet.
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General steps to set up links to Microsoft Access
data sets

• Set up ODBC driver on database server. Be sure
  to use the Microsoft Access Driver (.mdb)
  driver
• Edit/create an iniths_sid.ora file
• Edit tnsnames.ora file
• Edit listener.ora file. Dont forget to restart
  listener!
• Set up public database link.
• Test connection.

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General steps to use Discoverer as a portlet in
Portal.

• If you are new to Discoverer, consider running
  the Discoverer tutorials theyll help you get a
  jump start on creating something useful with your
  data.
• Use Discoverer Administrator to set up end user
  layers (EULs) in your Oracle database.
• Use Discoverer Plus to create workbooks/worksheets
  .
• Follow Metalink Note 212070.1, How to add the
  Discoverer Portlet in a Portal Page Group?

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Discoverer tips that we learned along the way

• If analysis requires joining tables from an M/S
  Access database, consider coding these as
  calculated fields within Access and not
  performing the joins in Discoverer.
• The drill down feature was established by
  setting hierarchies for all of our date fields.
  Thus, the user can specify the granularity (e.g.,
  year, quarter, month, day, date).
• LOV Item Classes were utilized for coded
  fields. Thus, users can drag and drop specific
  values instead of having to remember which code
  to use.
• Think carefully when linking data across
  various datasets. It was very simple to combine
  databases/tables and produce erroneous results.
  Thus, we limited our data mapping to the highest
  level date geographic location.

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We portalized a lot of our assets
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Conclusions

• We found the components of 9iAS Release 2, were
  considerably easier to install and configure than
  Release 1.
• WebCache worked right away and Portal has been
  more stable.
• Several out-of-the-box features (e.g., the suite
  of wizards to create Forms, Reports, LOVs) were
  easy to learn and actually fun to use.
• The ability to retrieve information from our
  Microsoft Access datasets, via a Discoverer
  portlet, is a real bonus!
• New portlets being posted both good bad news

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Were looking forward to 9.0.4

• Location portlet MapViewer Tool
• Even though we dont use Oracle Spatial, were
  curious to see if it will work with all of our
  GIS data.
• Customizable portlets
• We hope to use the connector for Active
  Directories to allow third-party authentication
  from our O/S.

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Life is good !!!