BusinessObjects™ XI Release 2 for Dummies®

Chapter 7. Joining Your Universe

In This Chapter

• Adding tables to your universe

• Creating joins between your tables

• Detecting joins

• Using loops

If you’re reading this chapter, it’s likely that you’ve already created your universe shell in Chapter 5. This means that you’ve created the schema that composes your universe and you’ve probably added a few tables. That’s a great first step toward creating your first universe. As you probably have guessed by now, a BusinessObjects universe isn’t something that you create overnight, or at least not in a few book pages!

Not every BusinessObjects user has to create a universe; this important task comes with a lot of responsibility that isn’t necessarily for beginning users, especially in a corporate environment. An administrator-level user who has extensive BusinessObjects or business-intelligence experience is likeliest to be creating universes.

But even if you’re just learning the ropes of BusinessObjects, it’s worth having a go at creating a universe. So now it’s time to tie together those tables you created in your schema. To do so, you use a join — the logical equivalent of a pipe or duct that connects two or more tables. It’s sort of like the plumbing in your bathroom — imagine that the sink, the toilet, and the shower are each a database table. You use a join, or plumbing pipes, to connect the tables in a way that makes sense and serves a purpose ...