Brother-Eagle Enterprise Edition Tip

One of the coolest things about Brother-Eagle Enterprise Edition is that not only can the DBA user add their own metrics to the scrolling stock ticker display, but drill down reports can also be created for any user defined custom metric. Professional Edition users have long had the ability to add their own metrics, but the capability to add drill down reports for custom metrics is a new feature unique to Enterprise Editions of Brother-Eagle.

Sure, you can add more database performance metrics to the display. But, you can also turn Brother-Eagle into a business monitor!

Let's say you or your management is interested in monitoring sales of a particular item. You can easily add a new metric "ItemSales" to the stock ticker display:

1. Click Menu
2. Choose Create Parameter
3. Specify a name for Parameter Name (e.g. ItemSales)
4. In the "Parameter SELECT Statement" box, specify the query to run to compute the value of ItemSales. Here is a sample query (table and column names vary, please supply your own actual names):
   • Select sum(QTY_SOLD) from PROD.SALESDETAIL where PRODUCT = 'Item' and SALES_DATE = CURRENT DATE
5. Click the Test SQL button to verify syntax and see test results. If the SQL is correct, you will see "Result: NNNN" where NNNN is the resultant integer or decimal value of the SQL query.
6. Once you have successfully tested your new metric, you can add a drill down report to show details.
7. To create a drill down report, place your cursor in the "Parameter Drill Down Statement" text box and compose the query that will be executed when the user chooses to Drill Down. Here is a sample query (again, table and column names vary, please supply your own actual names):
   • Select Region, State, Zip, Customer, Order_Time, QTY_SOLD from PROD.SALESDETAIL where PRODUCT = 'Item' and SALES_DATE = CURRENT DATE
8. Click the Test Drill Down button to test your query. A window will pop open showing you the results of the query if there are no errors.
9. Lastly, you can even create "Expert Advice" for your custom metric by specifying a web server URL in the "Expert Advice URL" text box. When the user chooses "Advice", the default browser will be launched and the page referred to in the URL will be loaded. In this way, you can explain to Brother-Eagle users what the "ItemSales" metric is and why it might be important to your organization. Here's an example:
   • http://www.your-company-intranet.net/dbateam/ItemSalesAdvice.html
   • It goes without saying, of course, that this URL should point to a valid web page
10. After defining the new metric, testing it, optionally adding a drill down report and testing it, and optionally providing an Expert Advice URL, click the SAVE button.
11. Congratulations!

ItemSales should now be displaying in your scrolling stock ticker! When the user's mouse hovers over this metric, scrolling will stop. Right click on the metric to see available Drill Down reports or Advice, if any were defined.

Hopefully this blog post illustrates to you how easy it can be to add your own metrics to Brother-Eagle complete with Drill Down reports. Remarkably, you don't even need to use Brother-Eagle as a database performance monitor --- you can use it as a fancy application development framework for manager and business reports!! The capabilities of Brother-Eagle are limited only by your imagination!

Have fun!!!

Cheers, The DBI Team