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Oracle Business Intelligence – An Introduction

Introduction

Oracle BI Standard Edition One is a product that is used to extract business information concealed in the data. This helps businesses in making effective and informed decisions at all times.
The components that form a part of Oracle BI are as follows:

  1. Oracle Database 10g Standard Edition One (with Oracle Warehouse Builder – OWB)
  2. Oracle BI Server
  3. Oracle BI Answers
  4. Oracle BI Interactive Dashboards
  5. Oracle BI Publisher

To use any component, you have to log in to it first.

In this very short article, we will see in brief what each of these components does and what options it offers to the various levels of users. Also, at the end of the article, there is a brief introduction to Oracle Data Mining API.

ORACLE WAREHOUSE BUILDER (OWB)

OWB is used to create the logical and physical design of the data mart. The four main steps in order to set up the data mart are as follows:

  1. Create a logical design for a data mart schema – e.g. star, snowflake, etc
  2. Use the logical design to create a physical design (mapping)
  3. Create objects for the data mart
  4. Populate the data mart with data by creating and executing a process flow

Steps to be followed to access the OWB repository are as follows:

  1. Open the Design Centre of the Oracle Warehouse builder
  2. Establish connection information – i.e. the host name, the port number and the service name
  3. Login with your username and password
  4. The Design Centre has three explorer windows:
    1. Project Explorer – It is used to manage the objects of type Databases, Files and Process Flows to populate the data mart with data.
    2. Global Explorer
    3. Connection Explorer

ORACLE BI SERVER

The Oracle BI Server is used to build a repository of metadata from the data mart that was created using the Oracle Data warehouse builder.
The Oracle BI server does the following jobs:

  1. Imports metadata from data sources for the repository’s physical layer
  2. Reorganize metadata to form a business model
  3. Use the model to create a presentation layer for the users

ORACLE BI ANSWERS

The users ultimately interact with Oracle BI Answers to extract useful information from the data mart created using OWB (Oracle Warehouse Builder).
This component is used to perform the following functions:

  1. Creating queries
  2. Adding user interactivity
  3. Formatting views, charts and tables

 In short, Oracle Answers BI is used to analyze the data.

ORACLE INTERACTIVE DASHBOARDS

As the name suggests, the Oracle Dashboards are used to publish the data extracted from the data mart so that the users can have an easy access to it. This component is used to build a custom interactive dashboard that allows users to access the returned answers of the requests placed through the Oracle BI Answers. Also, it provides the capability to filter the dashboard results.

ORACLE BI PUBLISHER

The Oracle BI publisher is used to create reports that are very essential to any kind of business. It is used to create an invoices report from the Oracle Database, publish it and schedule its automatic delivery. The report can also be created from the Oracle BI Answers requests or Oracle repository metadata.

ORACLE DATA MINING

Oracle Data Mining (ODM) is used to incorporate data mining with the Oracle database. Since ODM work on the Oracle tables without any external support, there is no need to extract or transform the data into some other form. ODM can run independently of any other User Interface.
ODM is used for both supervised (where a particular target value should be specified) and unsupervised (where patterns in data are observed) data mining. ODM allows the usage of the following algorithms, among many others:

  1. Supervised data mining:
  1. Classification
  2. Regression
  3. Attribute Importance
  4. Anomaly Detection
  1. Unsupervised data mining:
  1. Clustering
  2. Association models
  3. Feature extraction

The results of Oracle Data Mining can be viewed by the Oracle BI’s reporting/publishing component.

CONCLUSION

Oracle’s Business Intelligence helps in Enterprise Performance Management. This particular suite of Oracle – the Standard Edition One Suite – is ideal for 5 to 50 users – for an emerging enterprise. It provides leading BI and warehousing (or data mart) technologies. 
This brief article just covered the basic steps of working with Oracle BI Standard Edition One and showcased the various tasks that can be performed using this Oracle suite.