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.