BusinessObjects™ XI Release 2 for Dummies®

Chapter 5. Creating a Universe from the Safety of Your Desk

In This Chapter

• Working with BusinessObjects Designer

• Building a universe the old-school way

• Mastering the Universe Builder

When you think of BusinessObjects or any other business-intelligence tool, the first thing that probably comes to mind is reports. Why not? Reports are the rock stars of BusinessObjects; they are what most users ultimately work with.

Of course, before you can use reports, you need a universe in place. No, not the big one (that one’s already in place), but a specific body of metadata:

✓	In business intelligence, metadata is information that describes your data and the way it’s structured; don’t confuse it with actual data!
✓	A universe is a set of metadata that describes what’s in a relational database that’s dedicated to a specific group of users.

For example, say that you own a boutique. You may have a partial or entire database dedicated solely to Customers. The metadata that describes that data makes up the Customers universe.

BusinessObjects lets you create the universe you need (what a concept), so that later on you can create the reports you want. There’s no shortage of ways to create a universe in BusinessObjects:

✓	BusinessObjects Designer: The easiest way to go about creating a universe with Designer is to use the Quick Design Wizard (see the section “Working with BusinessObjects Designer” for details).
✓	Designer via the Universe Parameters window: You can put together your universe manually. Just flip ...