| Oracle® Business Intelligence Standard Edition One Tutorial Release 10g (10.1.3.2.1) E10312-01 |
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| Oracle® Business Intelligence Standard Edition One Tutorial Release 10g (10.1.3.2.1) E10312-01 |
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Selecting a business intelligence product to suit all your needs is a challenging task. There are too many products, too many vendors, and too much confusion. Often, you must act as a systems integrator for products that are designed, implemented, sold, and supported by different vendors.
By purchasing Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition One (Oracle BI Standard Edition One), you now have in one place all of the products that you need to extract the business intelligence concealed in your business data so that you can more easily make the right business decisions at the right time. Oracle BI Standard Edition One has been developed on one key premise: Better Decisions Made Simple.
Using Oracle BI Standard Edition One, you can immediately reap the benefits of being able to quickly distill operational information into business reports and to deliver them automatically through a number of channels, including Web dashboards. Taking it a step further, you can readily transform operational data into data marts, which enable you to further classify and aggregate information so that you can perform in-depth analysis through any number of dimensions (such as time) and hierarchies (for example, drill down from year to quarter to month).
The components of Oracle BI Standard Edition One are:
Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition One, which includes Oracle Warehouse Builder
Oracle BI Server
Oracle BI Answers
Oracle BI Interactive Dashboards
Oracle BI Publisher
This chapter contains the following topics:
Oracle Database 10g is the latest release of the leading relational database for business intelligence and data warehousing today. Oracle is most often chosen because of its success in satisfying the core requirements for data management: performance, scalability, and manageability.
Oracle Warehouse Builder, also known as Warehouse Builder or OWB, is a business intelligence tool that provides an integrated solution for designing and deploying enterprise data warehouses, data marts, and business intelligence applications.
Warehouse Builder is more than an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool. It supports the complete information management life cycle:
Design: Importing enterprise data models, graphical modeling of multidimensional schemas, and intuitive mapping of the source to the target
Build: Generation and population of the warehouse and marts by using Oracle Database features
Extract, transform, and load data: Extracting relational sources, flat file sources, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) sources, such as Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and SAP
Integrate: Integrating readily with the Oracle Database (Oracle Real Application Clusters, Oracle Online Analytical Processing, Oracle Spatial, Oracle Enterprise Manager, and so on), Oracle E-Business Suite, and Oracle Business Intelligence
Maintain: Maintaining the warehouse and refreshing data
This dedicated BI server provides the common business model and abstraction layer for the analytics applications. Oracle BI server supports access to multiple data sources, including relational databases (Oracle, SQL Server, and so on), OLAP sources (Analysis Services, Oracle OLAP) and offline sources (Excel, XML, and so on), among others.
The platform supports a full complement of access, analysis, and information delivery options, all in one fully integrated Web environment. Each of these components serves different audiences in the organization who have different appetites for the same underlying data, but need to access it in different ways. But unlike other BI tools, all components are integrated by a common architecture, enabling a seamless and intuitive user experience.
Oracle BI Answers provides true end user ad hoc capabilities in a pure Web architecture. Users interact with a logical view of the information—completely hidden from data structure complexity while simultaneously preventing runaway queries—and can easily create charts, pivot tables, reports, and visually appealing dashboards, all of which are fully interactive and drillable and can be saved, shared, modified, formatted, or embedded in the user's personalized Oracle BI Intelligence Dashboards. The results are new levels of business user self-sufficiency in an environment that is fully secure and controlled by IT.
Oracle BI Interactive Dashboards provide any knowledge worker with intuitive, interactive access to information that is actionable and dynamically personalized based on the individual's role and identity. In the Oracle BI Interactive Dashboards environment, the end user is working with live reports, prompts, charts, tables, pivot tables, graphics, and tickers in a pure Web architecture. The user has full capability for drilling, navigating, modifying, and interacting with these results. Oracle BI Interactive Dashboards can also aggregate content from a wide variety of other sources, including the Internet, shared file servers, and document repositories.
Oracle BI Publisher (formerly known as XML Publisher) offers the most efficient, scalable reporting solution available for complex, distributed environments. It provides a central architecture for generating and delivering information to employees, customers, and business partners—both securely and in the right format. Oracle BI Publisher report formats can be designed using Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat, tools most users are already familiar with. Oracle BI Publisher also enables you to bring data in from multiple data sources into a single output document. You can deliver reports by printer, e-mail, or fax. You can publish your report to a portal. You can allow users to collaboratively edit and manage reports on Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDav) Web servers. As part of Oracle BI, Oracle BI Publisher leverages common dashboarding, metadata, security, calculation, caching, and intelligent request generation services.
One of the key benefits of Oracle BI Standard Edition One is that you can begin by implementing only those components that are needed to satisfy your immediate requirements, and then evolve the solution architecture as your business requirements grow.
The following example demonstrates how you might begin using Oracle BI Standard Edition One, and then extend the architecture to meet your growing requirements:
Start with Oracle BI Publisher by connecting it to your transactional system (such as an order entry application) to generate operational business reports and documents.
You now have multiple data sources, an Excel spreadsheet containing sales projections, and the order entry system. Using these data sources, you need to report on actuals versus targets. You can add Oracle BI Server into the architecture to logically tie together these two data sources.
The volume of order entry data has grown significantly, and reporting directly off the transactional system poses a performance issue. You need to aggregate and stage the historical transactional data by creating a data mart. You can use Oracle Warehouse Builder to build the data mart.
Both the reporting requirements and the user population have increased, and have become more sophisticated. You can add Oracle BI Answers and Oracle BI Interactive Dashboards to deliver ad hoc querying and self-service dashboards to your users.
