Oracle Application Server 10g Essentials [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Chapter 12. Business Intelligence Components

The use of business intelligence systems has
been steadily gaining in popularity as companies use increasingly
larger amounts of data to make strategic and tactical decisions.
Business intelligence systems allow business analysts to answer
fundamental business questions, such as:

How many of a company's products have been sold in
specific geographic areas over particular periods of time?

Who are the company's most reliable suppliers?

Have particular product campaigns been successful?

Who are the company's most valuable customers?

Analysts work with both prebuilt reports of real-time and
near-real-time transaction data (in online transaction processing
systems and operational data stores) and historical data (often
accessed from data warehouses and data marts). They may also wish to
pose their own questions through ad hoc query tools, perform more
sophisticated trend analysis and forecasting through
online
analytical processing (OLAP) tools, and possibly build and leverage
custom mathematical models to predict outcomes in which a very large
number of variables are present through data mining. All this information can
then be pulled together for viewing in a single desktop via a
dashboard or a portal.

Oracle Application Server enables the deployment of business
intelligence tools used by business analysts, as well as the business
analysis applications created by software developers. Because the
Oracle

database is the typical target
database for such analyses, more analysis capabilities have, over
time, moved from Oracle's tools into the database
itself. Today, the Oracle database includes a variety of advanced
query optimization capabilities, including:

Parallel bitmap star join support

Understanding of summary-level tables in facts and dimensions called
materialized
views

Advanced analytics and statistics enabled through SQL

Embedded OLAP and data mining capabilities

You can take advantage of these advanced capabilities with the
business intelligence components available in Oracle Application
Server.

Business intelligence components in Oracle
Application Server include:

OracleAS Portal

OracleAS Portal provides an integration
point for custom-built business intelligence applications using
OracleAS Reports Services, OracleAS Discoverer, and other tools. It
also provides access to a number of other applications and web sites
through its interface and is evolving into a workplace manager that
is highly customizable by users. Chapter 13
contains a full discussion of this product.

Reporting tools

Reports are
typically created in IT organizations using Oracle Reports Developer
and are then deployed for general business usage with OracleAS
Reports Services. The OracleAS Reports Services are a part of Oracle
Application Server and is described in greater detail in Chapter 9. Oracle Reports Developer is included in
the Oracle Development Suite.

Query and analysis tools

More
savvy business
analysts may choose to submit their own ad hoc queries and to
generate reports via OracleAS
Discoverer using data residing in the
database. Some query and analysis tools available from Oracle
partners can also be deployed using Oracle Application Server.

Oracle Application Server can also serve as a deployment platform for
custom-built OLAP and data
mining applications. Advanced application developers can also use
Oracle JDeveloper (part of the
Oracle Developer Suite) with OracleAS

Business Intelligence JavaBeans
(BI Beans) to develop applications that leverage the OLAP Option. In
addition, they can develop data mining applications using JDeveloper
with Data Mining for Java (DM4J).

The Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) is an
important tool you can use to build and maintain the business
intelligence infrastructure. Bundled with the Oracle Developer Suite
or the database, this tool can be used to design target operational
data stores, data warehouses, and data marts, and
build extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) scripts. Oracle
Warehouse Builder allows you to exchange data stored in its Metadata
Repository with OracleAS Discoverer and other tools. The product
includes detailed metadata reporting capabilities.

This chapter describes the various business intelligence components
available in Oracle Application Server as well as the use of
Oracle's data mining and data warehouse tools. It
closes by looking briefly at the management of the business
intelligence infrastructure.