About the Presentation Layer

You can provide customized, secure, role-based views of a business model to users in the Presentation layer.

Role-based views provide object security and also provide a way to hide some of the complexity of the business model.

In the Presentation layer, you can set an implicit fact column. The primary function of the Presentation layer is to provide custom names, dictionary entries, organization, and security for different groups of users.

Presentation layer views are called subject areas. In previous versions, subject areas were called presentation catalogs. You can create a subject area that's identical to your business model, or you can create role-based subject areas that show a single subject or that supports a specific business role. Subject areas aren't abstract views. You should create subject areas that organize your content in a way that benefits your users.

Subject areas in the Presentation layer appear as catalogs to client tools that use the Oracle BI Server as an ODBC data source. Subject areas contain presentation tables, columns, hierarchies, and levels.

Even though the Logical SQL requests from Answers and other clients query the presentation tables and columns, the logic for entities, relationships, and joins is in the Business Model and Mapping layer.