I don’t usually talk about things I’m planning on doing or haven’t done yet, but I’m going to make an exception. I’m putting together a webinar for ODTUG (you are a member, right?) that I’ll be presenting in late October (October 28th to be exact, MARK YOUR CALENDARS!). The webinar will be on – you guessed it – Drillbridge (maybe I need to change this to Jason’s Drillbridge Blog…).

Thankfully, this won’t be my first presentation or webinar. Your humble author has presented on all manner of topics, including load rule optimization, Oracle Data Integrator tips and tricks, Dodeca, Essbase Web Services, and a few other things for good measure. I am delighted to report that this will be my first webinar on a piece of software I have created, though, so I’m pulling out all the stops and designing what I’m tentatively calling the Drillbridge WOW demo.

The overall webinar will be about an hour long, but what I want to do is have a section or segment where I kind of race to deploy drill-through functionality to a cube and show off how powerful the Drillbridge features and expression language can be.

So here’s what I’d like to do, all in one fell swoop: download and install it, configure a datasource, define a report, deploy the definition to a cube, AND use complex mappings/features, namely that the report itself will feature drill to bottom where the lowest level of the dimension needs to be mapped (such as from Jan to ’01’ or similar) and the other dimensions need some sort of similar mapping such as removing a prefix or otherwise altering the member from the point of view. On top of that, we’ll then flip on Smart Formatting with a different locale (French, anyone?), re-run the report, then download it to Excel. And to top it all off, I’ll do this all in 10 minutes or less.

That’s right – 10 minutes (or less!). That’s crazy. To think, I once spent hundreds of hours achieving this same result using different tools.

Sound good? Sound crazy? Well, the good news, as I said, is that this functionality all exists already and is ready to go in 1.3.0. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m just cleaning things up and testing them to ensure that Drillbridge is as robust as possible before releasing this major release.

I’m pretty excited, but more importantly I am excited to be able to help the larger Hyperion community provide drill-through to its users in an evolutionary and incremental way with this great little tool. Stay tuned for more.