Oracle BI

Components of Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) – Oracle Answers

June 14, 2011/1 Comment/in Business Intelligence, Oracle BI, Posts /by Adam Getz

Oracle Answers is a component of the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition suite that provides ad-hoc query and analysis capabilities to end-users. Users can processes data from multiple data sources in a pure web environment. In addition, users are isolated from underlying data structures as they view and work with a logical view of the information. This logical view of the information is presented to the user in business terms. The interface of Oracle Answers is highly-intuitive and enables end-users to create:: • Queries; • Data tables; • Interactive charts and graphs; • Pivot tables; • Reports; • Prompts

Oracle Answers provides a point-and-click interface that allows end-user to develop robust ad-hoc queries and reports. Users simply drag-n-drop fields to create layouts with reports, queries, and charts on the right-hand side of the application. Data fields are subsequently on listed on the left-hand side.

In addition, Oracle Answers is tightly integrated Oracle Interactive Dashboards. Reports, prompts, tables, charts, & graphs created in Oracle Answers can be easily saved, shared, modified, formatted, or integrated within dashboards of the Oracle Interactive Dashboards application.

Components of Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) – Oracle Interactive Dashboards

June 13, 2011/0 Comments/in Business Intelligence, Oracle BI, Posts /by Adam Getz

Oracle Interactive Dashboards is a presentation component of the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) suite and provides versatile, web-based dashboards that displays information in a highly-intuitive format to help end-users’ decision making. The user interface is completely graphical while access to the information is interactive and based on the individual’s role and identity. Further, the user has full capability for modifying and interacting with data utilizing the following controls …: • Live reports; • Charts; • Tables; • Prompts; • Pivot tables

Additionally, the Oracle Interactive Dashboards provides the user with full capability of drilling, navigating, modifying, and interacting with data sets. This concept is commonly referred to as “guided analysis“. Oracle Interactive Dashboards can retrieve and aggregate content from a wide variety of sources, including the traditional databases, data warehouses and data marts, shared file servers, and document repositories.

Oracle Interactive Dashboards provide personalized views of corporate and external information. A dashboard consists of one or more pages, which appear as tabs across the top of the dashboard. Pages can display anything that you can access or open with your Web browser, such as saved queries and requests, alerts from Oracle Delivers, images, charts, tables, text, and links to Web sites and documents.

Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Analytical Applications

June 7, 2011/1 Comment/in Business Intelligence, Oracle BI, Posts /by Adam Getz

Rather than just being a platform or development environment, Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Analytical Applications are fully inclusive business intelligence solutions that incorporate all of the key metrics, workflows, and business processes for a particular business function. Bundled within theses solutions are numerous pre-built components including:: • Dashboards; • Metrics; • Reports; • Drill-down paths; • Dimensional models; • Naming standards; • Database objects; • ETL routines; • Metadata; • Security

In addition, Oracle BI Analytical Applications contain universal adapters that allow for rapid integration and direct connections with leading commercial-off-the shelf (COTS) packages including SAP, Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and Siebel applications systems.

Oracle BI Analytical Applications come bundled with best practices and industry standards built-in. Additionally, they include all of the functionality required to conduct business intelligence for many common business functions including financials, human resources, sales, service, contact centers, marketing, supply chains, order management and fulfillment business areas.

Fundamentally, Oracle BI Analytical Applications are built upon the Oracle BI Platform and provide complete end-to-end, prebuilt business intelligence solutions that deliver intuitive, role-based intelligence to all members of an organization including senior executives, mid-level managers, and front-line employees. So rather than developing custom business intelligence solutions for each business area and function, the use of Oracle BI Analytical Applications allows an organization the ability to rapidly configure a ready-built solution utilizing the complete Oracle BI Platform.

Oracle BI Analytical Applications come bundled with two main additional pre-built back-end repositories:: • Business Analytics Warehouse; • ETL (Extract-Transform-Load) Repository

The Business Analytics Warehouse (BAW) is a completely pre-built data warehouse that physically contains all of necessary dimension and fact table needed for the business intelligence applications. The BAW is fully-compliant with the dimensional modeling methodology developed by Ralph Kimball and supports many advanced techniques including slowly changing dimensions, conformed dimensions, aggregate tables, hierarchy tables, and surrogate keys.

The ETL repository includes all of the routines for extracting of data to a staging area, transforming the data into a common format, the loading of date into data warehouse tables, changed data capture, and seeding data for common dimensions. In addition, the powerful ETL repository consist of two main components, Informatica which is the ETL engine that contains the data integration routines, and the DAC (Data Warehouse Application Console) which is the “ETL orchestration tool” that controls application configuration, execution & recovery, and monitoring.

Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Platform

June 3, 2011/0 Comments/in Business Intelligence, Oracle BI, Posts /by Adam Getz

The Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Platform is a set of functions and tools that incorporate a number of advanced business intelligence products. In addition to providing a broad set of functions and tools, the Oracle BI Platform is built upon a proven, modern web services-oriented architecture that provides the foundation of the construction of complete business intelligence solutions. In addition, the platform delivers a full range of capabilities related to business intelligence capabilities including…: • Dashboards; • Ad-hoc queries; • Alerts and notifications; • Operational reports; • Predictive intelligence; • Disconnected analytics; • Microsoft Office integration

Fundamentally, the Oracle BI Platform comes with the tools and functions for developing sophisticated custom business intelligence environments like the one pictured here …

At its core, the Oracle BI Platform is an innovative next-generation business intelligence environment that offers the software tools for building enterprise BI solutions from data spanning both Oracle and non-Oracle data sources and applications. The Oracle BI Platform has been meticulously designed to allow for pervasive use within an organization. This sophisticated environment includes a full range of easy-to-use and intuitive end-user tools such as interactive dashboards, advanced reporting and publishing, full ad-hoc analysis over the web, proactive detection and alerts, mobile analytics, Microsoft Office integration, web services and business process integration.

The Oracle BI platform provides transparent and seamless access to numerous heterogeneous data sources. This highly developed platform also allows for development of custom business intelligence implementations that access data from traditional relational databases, OLTP & ODS systems, data warehouses and data marts, flat files, and web services. Further in 2008, Oracle released the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition Plus Platform, which provides direct connections to Hyperion data sources including Essbase and its related financial performance management applications.

The Oracle BI Platform has been developed over several years and includes the most advanced features from the former NQuire and Siebel Analytics products recently acquired by Oracle Corporation.