Oracle^® Business Intelligence Server Administration Guide > Completing Setup and Managing Oracle BI Repository Files > Setting Up the Repository to Work with Delivers >

About the SA System Subject Area

In Oracle BI, data visibility can be defined by the groups to which a user belongs. For example, when Oracle BI applications customers log on, the GROUP system session variable can be populated and the user sees certain subject areas and columns depending on the groups that exist in the variable. Although the GROUP system session variable provides Oracle BI with the groups to which each user belongs, it does not identify the users that are in each group.

SA System is a presentation catalog (called subject area in Answers) that addresses this data visibility issue by exposing users in a group to Delivers. It also allows contact information such as email addresses to be retrieved from a database and used as delivery devices in Delivers. This allows Oracle BI Administrators to set up the Oracle BI Server to automatically populate delivery devices and profiles for users instead of requiring users to update their My Account screen in Delivers.

Group membership is often maintained in an external database such as Oracle's Siebel transactional database and not in the Oracle BI repository. This information can be propagated to the Oracle BI Server and Oracle BI Presentation Services through the GROUP session variable. The SA System subject area provides group membership and external email addresses to Delivers when used in conjunction with the GROUP session variable.