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Oracle BI Applications (BI Apps) is a prebuilt business intelligence solution. BI Apps supports Oracle sources, such as Oracle E-Business Suite Applications, Oracle's Siebel Applications, Oracle's PeopleSoft Applications, Oracle's JD Edwards Applications, and non-Oracle sources, such as SAP Applications.

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The Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse is a unified data repository for all

customer-centric data, which supports the analytical requirements of the supported

source systems.

The Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse includes the following:

• A complete enterprise data warehouse data model with numerous prebuilt star

schemas encompassing many conformed dimensions and several hundred fact

tables.

• An open architecture to allow organizations to use third-party analytical tools in

conjunction with the Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse. By default the Oracle

Business Intelligence Suite will be used for reporting and analysis.

• Prebuilt data extractors to incorporate data from external applications into the

Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse. These prebuilt data extractors are called the

Packaged ETL (extract-transform-load) maps for Oracle known source systems,

and Universal Adapter for any other source system.

• The Oracle Business Intelligence Data Warehouse Administration Console (DAC),

a centralized console for the set up, configuration, administration, loading, and

monitoring of the Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse.

The entire solution is also named Applicative Warehousing, since all components for a

Data Warehouse solution have been prebuilt and packaged.

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High-level analytical queries, like those commonly used in Oracle Business

Intelligence, scan and analyze large volumes of data using complex formulas. This

process can take a long time when querying a transactional database, which impacts

overall system performance.

For this reason, the Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse was constructed using

dimensional models to allow for fast access to information required for decision

making. The Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse derives its data from several

source systems. This is done by software that extracts, transforms and loads the data

into the Business Analytics Warehouse.

On top of the Business Analytics Warehouse there is a reporting solution based on the

Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition, usually abbreviated as OBI EE.

OBI EE provides a full range of business intelligence capabilities that allow you to:

• Collect up-to-date data from your organization (usually lags 1 day due to overnight

data loading)

• Present the data in easy-to-understand formats (such as tables and graphs)

• Deliver data in a timely fashion to the employees in your organization

These capabilities enable your organization to make better decisions, take informed

actions, and implement more efficient business processes.

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Oracle provides several Manuals and Documents specifically for BI Applications.

Besides these BI Applications specific documentation, manuals for the tools used

within BI Applications are also available, such as OBI EE, DAC and Informatica.

stallation and a Configuration Document, where all steps have placed in the right

order.

The manuals that are in bold text are the manuals that we use most.

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In the previous section we have taken a look at this picture already.

Within the next slides we will take a detailed look at the components.

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This picture will explain how the data will be extracted from a source system (like

Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, SAP or custom build) into the Business

Analytical Warehouse (BAW).

The tools used within this part of the BI Apps solution are:

• Informatica Powercenter (Designer, Workflow Manager & Monitor)

• Data Warehouse Administration Console – DAC

Informatica Powercenter objects have been prebuilt and are stored within a repository.

The prebuilt objects are data flows (usually called ‘mappings’) and workflows

(execution of tasks).

The DAC components have also been pre-built and stored within a repository.

The main purpose of the DAC is to orchestrate the Data Loading processes, usually

called ETL processes. The DAC starts a so-called execution plan to load all relevant

data for one or more analytical BI Apps modules. Within this execution plan tasks will

be executed in the proper order, such as truncating tables, loading data, building

indexes and gathering statistics for query table access optimization.

For all of these steps logging will be held for monitoring purposes.

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DAC provides a framework for the entire life cycle of data warehouse

implementations. It enables you to create, configure, execute, and monitor modular

data warehouse applications in a parallel, high-performing environment.

DAC complements the Informatica ETL platform. It provides application-specific

capabilities that are not prebuilt into ETL platforms. For example, ETL platforms are

not aware of the semantics of the subject areas being populated in the data warehouse

nor the method in which they are populated. DAC provides the following application

capabilities at a layer of abstraction above the ETL execution platform:

• Dynamic generation of subject areas and execution plans

• Dynamic settings for parallelism

• Intelligent task queue engine based on user- defined and computed scores

• Automatic full and incremental mode aware

• Index management for ETL and query performance

• Embedded high performance Siebel OLTP change capture techniques

• Ability to restart at any point of failure

• Phase-based analysis tools for isolating ETL bottlenecks

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The BAW – Business Analytics Warehouse – is probably the most invisible part of the

BI Applications. However, it is the central component of the BI Applications solution.

The BAW is a set of dimensional models stored as tables in a database. The BAW can

be installed on many types of databases, such as DB2, Oracle, MS SQL Server and

Teradata. A dimensional model is an optimized data model used within Business

Intelligence environments. The model is optimized for query performance, but more

importantly: It allows end users to understand the data model, because it has been set

up for their information requirements needs.

Data is loaded into the BAW on a regular basis (usually daily).

The data is captured at the lowest grain of information, allowing you to retrieve this

data at a very detailed level, such as an individual transaction or booking. The data

will usually be aggregated within reports for analytical purposes.

The data will become visible using OBI EE for reporting and analysis.

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Some comments on SSO:

If you chose to use SSO, it means that a user identifies hisself / herself once, and then

have the ability to login to different applications without having to enter the User

Name and Password again.

SSO will be setup within Weblogic. OBI uses the security settings from Weblogic.

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