Building a data analysis report with Oracle and Report Studio - oracle11g

Question

I have used information on this site for awhile, and now have a large project that I need some of your expertise on. I work within an Oracle 11g environment and also have Cognos Report Studio 10.1
I am building a multitab report that displays an analysis of a department's outbound orders. I have created a custom table that holds approximately 30 columns of data. From here, there are over 150 calculations that must be performed on the table daily. An example of these calculations are
1) How many orders received today?
2) Of the orders received today, how many shipped same day?
3) How many orders are on hold?
Basically 100s of 4-5 line queries on the core table. I have thought about creating a second table and with the use of WITH clauses, performing the calculations in a procedure and inserting into the table.
To get to the question, has anyone written a procedure/package that performed a large amount of calculations and is there any links/webpages that can be suggested? My searches have not led me to any examples of a report of this nature being created and am wanting to make sure that my approach is as efficient as possible. Thanks in advance for any information/resources.

Answer 1

A table and stored procedure is a great idea. Some considerations:
Will you be archiving these facts per day.
Ie, do you want to be able to lookup the orders that were on hold 5 days ago, or is all of the data in the 150 questions only relevant for the current date?
You can have a table with 150 columns, one for each question. That may make sense if you are archiving data and need one record per day.
The alternative is to create an order fact table with just two or three fields:
Fact_Name VARCHAR2(30)
Order_Fact NUMBER(10,2)
Last_Update_Date DATE
Your oracle stored procedure would query and update the facts one at a time:
insert into ORDER_FACTS
select "ORDERS_RECEIVED" fact_name, count(*) order_fact, sysdate
from ORDER_TABLE
where rcv_date = trunc(sysdate);
commit;
If you are only wanting to keep one record per fact, you would do an update.
If the answer to some of your questions is not a number, you may need to keep a separate table for facts with VARCHAR2 type.
If you like the sound of this solution, I can setup an example procedure tomorrow.
Edit:
Since you are storing 30 days worth of data, I would create the table at the Date detail level, and have 1 column to store each result. For my example I just included 3 columns so you could get the idea. First, create the table to hold your order facts.
create table order_facts
( DT DATE,
ORD_RCV NUMBER,
SAME_DAY_SHIPPED NUMBER,
ON_HOLD NUMBER);
I suggest the DT field stores the date alone. This will make the table easier to join with your calendar table, which you can use to join these facts to other reports easily if they are based on tables with Calendar in their star schema.
Next, create the procedure to update them:
CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE CALC_ORDER_FACTS ( iDate date := trunc(sysdate), iPurgeDays number := 0)
IS
ddate DATE;
dummy DATE;
/*
Calc_order_facts
Date Author Note
04/11/2013 XXX Created this procedure
Param iDate (optional, default trunc(sysdate)
Specify Date to calculate order facts for
Param iPurgeDays number (optional, default 0)
Specify how many days to retain data. Data older than iPurgeDays will be deleted.
If 0, purging is disabled.
*/
BEGIN
ddate := iDate;
IF iPurgeDays > 0 THEN
dbms_output.put_line('Purging data more than ' || to_char(iPurgeDays) || ' days old.');
begin
delete ORDER_FACTS
where DT < trunc(ddate-iPurgeDays);
commit;
EXCEPTION
WHEN NO_DATA_FOUND THEN
dbms_output.put_line('Purge found no data.');
WHEN OTHERS THEN
-- Consider logging the error and then re-raise
dbms_output.put_line('Purged failed, rollling back...');
rollback;
END;
END IF;
-- If date does not already exist in table, insert it
begin
select dt
into dummy
from order_facts
where dt = ddate;
EXCEPTION
WHEN NO_DATA_FOUND THEN
insert into order_facts
values (ddate, null, null, null);
commit;
END;
-- ORD_RCV
-- Calculate Orders received
update order_facts
set ord_rcv =
(select count(*) ord_rcv
from ORDER_TABLE
where rcv_date = ddate)
where dt = ddate;
commit;
-- SAME_DAY_SHIPPED
-- Calculate Orders received and shipped on ddate
update order_facts
set same_day_shipped =
(select count(*) same_day_shipped
from order_table
where rcv_dt = ddate
and ship_dt = ddate)
where dt = ddate;
commit;
-- ON_HOLD
-- Total orders on_hold
-- This method applies if you are only concerned with total on hold
update order_facts
set on_hold =
(select count(*) ON_HOLD
from order_table
where status = 'HOLD')
where dt = ddate;
commit;
END CALC_ORDER_FACTS;