Projects are the central enabler of metadata management.
A project consists of a discretely-defined subset of the repository metadata, in the form of groups of logical stars with associated metadata. A project has the following characteristics:
Is largely defined by logical fact tables in the applicable business model
Automatically adds related logical dimension tables and other metadata during extract
Can have one to many logical fact tables
For projects that are just beginning, the best practice is to begin with a repository containing all the necessary physical table and join definitions. In this repository, you create a logical fact table as a placeholder in the Business Model and Mapping layer and a subject area as a placeholder in the Presentation layer. As you add business model and subject area metadata, new projects based on individual subject areas and logical facts can be created.
Follow these guidelines when setting up projects:
Only one person at a time can create projects in a master repository.
Do not delete projects unless they are no longer under active development.
Choose your project name carefully when creating a project. Do not rename projects.
Use care when removing objects from projects to avoid problems with repository extract/check-out.
This section contains the following topics:
Projects can consist of Presentation layer subject areas and their associated business model logical facts, dimensions, groups, users, variables, and initialization blocks.
Administrators can create projects so that developers and groups of developers can work on projects in their area of responsibility.
The primary reason to create projects is to support multiuser development. During the development process, you can split up the work (metadata) between different teams within your company by extracting the metadata into projects so that each project group can access a different part of the metadata.
In addition to multiuser development, you may want to create projects for licensing reasons. Before releasing a new software version, you may want to ensure that only the metadata that is relevant to the licensed application is in a project and that everything is consistent and complete. You can accomplish this by adding only the fact tables that are relevant to the application.
Project extractions are fact table centric. This ensures that project extracts are consistent and makes licensing much easier to manage.
A project can represent a subject area or a subset of logical fact tables related to the selected subject area. The Oracle BI Administration Tool automatically adds the related business model and Physical layer objects to the project.
You can use the same object in multiple projects. You can choose to group facts by business model or you can select a business model or a set of logical fact tables that are part of a business model to use in a project. You need to explicitly add Presentation layer objects to your project.
Although the project definition does not include Physical layer objects, these objects are determined and extracted through the project definition.
After you create projects, they become part of the metadata and are available to multiple developers who need to perform development tasks on the same master repository. When defined this way, projects become a consistent repository after a developer checks out the projects and saves them as a new repository file.
In your project, it is more common to select Group Facts By Subject Area.
You can include objects in your project that are not referenced such as variables and initialization blocks that are directly referenced by other extracted objects. You can add the top node for each object type, for example, Variables, then selectively remove individual objects.
If you are using initialization blocks for authentication, include any necessary initialization blocks.
You can include repository variables or other objects that are not yet referenced by other objects, but that you might want to use in future repository development.
You can include users and application roles as part of your data access security settings.
If you do not see the set of subject areas you expect after the project is created, edit the project to explicitly add the subject areas you need.
When you upgrade a repository from Oracle Business Intelligence versions before 10.1.3.2, the project definition is upgraded.
During the upgrade, the project definition, subject areas, target levels, list catalogs, and existing fact tables are automatically converted into simple fact tables in the following way:
Get presentation columns related to the target levels through the qualifying keys.
Get presentation columns related to the list catalogs through the qualifying keys.
Get presentation columns related to the subject areas.
Get all the logical columns from all the presentation columns.
Get all the logical columns from the fact tables in the project.
Get the fact tables from all the logical columns.
After the upgrade, projects contain only simple fact tables. All the security objects remain unchanged.
In addition, projects in repositories from any version before 12c (12.2.1) are upgraded so that they explicitly contain Presentation layer objects. In previous releases, Presentation layer objects were implicitly included based on the permissions of the users included in the project.