Converting UNIX EPOCH Time Into Date Using OBIEE

Madan Thota — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:57:46 +0000

The UNIX epoch is the representation of points in time as the number of non-leap seconds since 00:00:00 UTC on January 1 1970, introduced by the UNIX operating system. Now most of the UNIX based systems maintain the time in epoch format and in most transactional system these data will save to database. When doing the reporting on these machines, the physical column which is storing date will be shown as double, because underlying data is a number of seconds. Here is the ways to handle these columns in OBIEE

This normally suggested doing in ETL process, because any ETL tool handles this very easily.

If you don’t have any option to do it in ETL, then do the following in RPD.

1. In physical layer change the data type of column to INT

2. Then in Business Model create a column with the following code.

TimestampAdd(SQL_TSI_SECOND, databasecolumn, TIMESTAMP ’1970-01-01 00:00:00.000′)

For example EVENTENG.CLOSEDDATE is my EPOCH date stored in database then my code will be

TimestampAdd(SQL_TSI_SECOND, EVENTENG.CLOSEDDATE, TIMESTAMP ’1970-01-01 00:00:00.000′)

3. Add the column to presentation layer

4. In Answers check the dates, if your UNIX server is saving the date in GMT 0, then you need to adjust above date based on your time zone.

Here is the web link which converts the EPOCH time to a valid date, Use this link to validate the conversion.

http://www.epochconverter.com/

Hello OBIEE World!

Madan Thota — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:06:55 +0000

I am Madan Thota, working as BI Architect and specilized in OBIEE. This is my first technical blog, and want to share and store some of my Ideas, Thoughts…and BI Tips. Want do it from so long, BI Friends asking me to do that.. finaly got inspired and get started with Hello OBIEE World. These days( 2008 ) participating actively in OBIEE Forums. Any way just to mention what ever i post here is all my personal views.

Wow…Feeling so good to start a blog and to share some ideas..

You can ask me questions related to obiee and feel free to comment my stuff.

Thanks

My Oracle Business Intelligence Weblog

Converting UNIX EPOCH Time Into Date Using OBIEE

Hello OBIEE World!