How to find RPD column usage in the BI reports?

A column could have been used in several reports spread across the OBIEE dashboards, and the question as to where exactly it is being referred is the one many business analysts like to be answered, and becomes more relevant when a change has to be made to physical column and impact analysis needs to be done for production reports. While there are several third party tools that build the complete column lineage, from dashboard to subject area, to physical column, and then to column in source system, I found OBIEE also has something nifty that can be used to answer many questions of not all.

Try this,

-          open catalog manager (offline mode preferred for faster response).

-          Select folder /shared (or whatever you are trying to explore)

-          Navigate to ‘tools > create reports’ and viola you are at the screen that will let you build the column mapping report

-          Select the columns you need in the report, specify the output report name with path, and hit OK.

-          Be patient, depending on the catalog size, this runs for a long time, in my case a good 20 mins, as we had several prebuilt dashboard as well.

This process will map the reports, you can run it again to have another output for dashboards. To go a step further, export the two outputs to access or a database, and you could possibly join to now map dashboard to column names. Now if you are thinking what I am thinking, you can join it to RPD extract to go upto the physical column name. Pretty neat…  huh?