Domains are similar to list of values and lookups commonly found in transactional systems. These often have language independent code, and one or more language dependent values associated with them. In BI Applications, they are used to support multiple languages and aggregations.
For example, we may have the domain GENDER with the domain members M and F. To support multiple languages, we may have corresponding English values of Man and Woman, and French values of Homme and Femme – the appropriate value returned based on the user’s preferred language.
Domains are often used as criteria in analyses. For example, a report such as Total # of Employees by Gender issues a SQL statement similar to SELECT GENDER, COUNT(*) FROM Table GROUP BY GENDER.
BI Applications ships a number of domains out-of-the-box that are used to support multiple languages and analyses. Customers may wish to extend BI Applications with additional domains to support their user’s multi-language and analytical needs.
Source-based domains are values that are extracted directly from the source system and loaded into the data warehouse with minimal changes (other than to default for NULL values).
Conformed domains are meant to provide a consistent set of analyses across multiple heterogeneous source systems that may use different codes to represent the same thing – the ETL process takes the source-based code and matches or conforms it to a BI Applications-specific code.
BI Applications support only custom source domains in the data warehouse. Mapping a new custom source domain to an existing conformed domain is not supported.
For more information about domains, see About Multi-Language Support in Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Administrator’s Guide.