With a handful of acquisitions by Oracle in the BI\Data warehousing space in the recent past it will be beneficial to know the correct fitment of the products in the entire Business Intelligence stack. In this discussion I will try to throw more light on the Oracle BI Stack as it stands today. I will try to incorporate as many technologies that are applicable. I have deliberately left out the Middle Ware portion of the stack to keep the architecture simple. However the components of the BI stack are highly pluggable and configurable with the Fusion Middle ware suite of products, thereby enhancing the BI capabilities significantly. Enterprise wide middleware components like the web server and security architecture seamlessly integrate with the entire BI Stack, decreasing the manageability costs associated with the infrastructure.
Business Intelligence is derived from data from the past, present and predictive data about the future. Different products cater for these different sets of data. A Combination of data from across these timelines gives the complete 360 degree view of the business and provides the necessary Intelligence to take decisive actions.
The data can be sourced from various systems. They may range from simple Excel sheets to complex data warehouses\marts. Various OLTP systems like Oracle Ebiz, SAP or custom databases can provide the system with data. Real time data can also be sourced from web services with this architecture
The ETL layer is required to post the data from the various data sources to a centralized data warehouse. ETL tools like Informatica and ELT tools like Oracle Data integrator are options available to carry out the ETL process. Apart from this a recent acquisition Golden Gate can be used to provide very near real-time
ODI -High Performance, High Productivity Data Integration
Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition delivers unique next-generation, Extract Load and Transform (E-LT) technology that improves performance, reduces data integration costs, even across heterogeneous systems. Unlike conventional ETL tools, Oracle Data Integrator EE offers the productivity of a declarative design approach, as well as the benefits of an active integration platform for seamless batch and real-time integration. In addition, hot-pluggable Knowledge Modules provide modularity, flexibility, and extensibility.
Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition is optimized for Oracle Database to provide real-time data warehousing with advanced ETL/ELT and data modeling. Use Oracle Data Integrator EE together with Oracle Data Profiling and Data Quality for advanced data governance capabilities. Use Oracle Data Integrator EE together with Oracle SOA Suite to enable service-oriented data integration and management that gives companies even greater flexibility for their data services.
Oracle Data Integration Enterprise Edition, a foundational component to the Oracle Data Integration Suite is Oracle Fusion Middleware's strategic data integration offering; which has emerged from combining the best of both Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) and Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) into a single unified product offering.
Golden Gate - Real-time Access to Real-time Information
Oracle GoldenGate provides real-time, log-based change data capture, and delivery between heterogeneous systems. Using this technology, it enables cost-effective and low-impact real-time data integration and continuous availability solutions.
Oracle GoldenGate moves committed transactions with transaction integrity and minimal overhead on your existing infrastructure. The architecture supports multiple data replication topologies such as one-to-many, many-to-many, cascading and bidirectional. Its wide variety of use cases includes real-time business intelligence; query offloading; zero-downtime upgrades and migrations; disaster recovery; and active-active databases for data distribution, data synchronization and high availability.
As data accumulates it is quite likely discrepancies percolate into it over time. This may lead to data issues and bad analytics. Examples like Pin code or Telephone number patters have to be consistently formatted and represented to ensure uniform interpretation of this data. This is achieved by implementing data Quality techniques during the data load process.
Also important Dimension data like Customer and Product ideally have to be same across the organizations. For example Scott Tiger and S. Tiger may mean the same thing in the context of a customer, but they may show up as different records in the customer Dimension which can lead up to analytics errors. Such scenarios are avoided by implementing Master Data Management.
Oracle Data Quality and Oracle Data Profiling - Improved Visibility and Control of Your Data
Oracle Data Profiling and Data Quality for Data Integrator extend Oracle Data Integration to provide advanced governance capabilities. Both products are fully integrated with Oracle Data Integration to place quality at the center of all your information initiatives and projects.
Oracle Data Profiling is a data investigation and quality monitoring tool. It allows business users to assess the quality of their data through metrics, to discover or infer rules based on this data, and to monitor historical metrics about data quality.
Oracle Data Quality for Data Integrator is the leading data quality platform that covers even the most complex data quality needs. Its powerful rule-based engine and its robust and scalable architecture places data cleansing at the heart of an enterprise data integration strategy.
Oracle MDM Data Quality
Data cleansing is at the heart of Oracle MDM’s ability to turn your data into an enterprise asset. Only standardized, de-duplicated, accurate, timely, and complete data can effectively serve an organization’s applications, business processes, and analytical systems. From point-of-entry anywhere across a heterogeneous IT landscape to end usage in a transactional application or a key business report, Oracle MDM’s Data Quality tools provide the fixes and controls that ensure maximum data quality.
There are two primary data categories: relatively structured party data and relatively unstructured item data. Party data includes people and company names such as customers , suppliers, partners, organizations, contacts, etc., as well as address, hierarchies and other attributes that describe who a party is. Pattern matching tools are best for cleansing this kind of data. Item data includes Products, Services, Assets, and the full range of attributes that describe what an item is. Semantic matching tools are required for cleansing this kind of data. This is why Oracle provides data quality tools specifically designed to handle these two kinds of data. One is a suite of Customer Data Quality servers and the other is a state-of-the-art Product Data Quality server.
The heart of the BI system would be the database. Oracles own Database or an Exadata machine can house the expected Terabytes of data optimally to cater to faster BI.
Oracle Exadata
Oracle Exadata Storage Servers combine Oracle's smart storage software and Oracle's industry-standard Sun hardware to deliver the industry's highest database storage performance. To overcome the limitations of conventional storage, Oracle Exadata Storage Servers use a massively parallel architecture to dramatically increase data bandwidth between the database server and storage. In addition, smart storage software offloads data-intensive query processing from Oracle Database 11g servers and does the query processing closer to the data. The result is faster parallel data processing and less data movement through higher bandwidth connections. This massively parallel architecture also offers linear scalability and mission-critical reliability.
Oracle Database
Complex data warehousing features like aggregation, bitmap indexes, Business Intelligence, Change Data Capture, CUBE, data mart, Data Mining, Data Pump, dimensions, direct path loads, ETL, ILM, materialized views, OLAP, partition, query rewrite, ranking, ROLLUP, VLDB are supported OOTB by the database in the latest releases.
Critical decision driving reports and dashboards are the futures of an Analytics solution. Though OBIEE remains the standard Analytics solution, tools like Interactive Reporting, Web Analysis etc that were a part of the Hyperion set of tools also cater to this space. BI Apps, built using the OBIEE tool, provides a OOTB analytics solution for predefined sources like Oracle E-Biz, Siebel CRM, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards. There is a compatibility matrix available with Oracle mapping the availability of the predefined ETL's with specific versions of the OLTP system .There are ETL's grouped as Universal Adaptors, that cater to getting data from other sources apart from the ones listed above (E.g. SAP, Custom OLTP systems etc)
OBIEE
Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus (Oracle BI EE Plus) is a comprehensive suite of enterprise BI products that delivers a full range of analysis and reporting capabilities. Featuring a unified, highly scalable, modern architecture, Oracle BI EE Plus provides intelligence and analytics from data spanning enterprise sources and applications—empowering the largest communities with complete and relevant insight.
OBIEE Applications
Oracle Business Intelligence Applications support over a dozen different functional areas with complete, pre-built, best-practice analytics, and a rich set of KPIs, metrics and analytic workflows. By accessing data from across the enterprise and delivering deep insight directly to business users, Oracle Business Intelligence Applications enable faster and more informed decisions that help the organization optimize resources, reduce costs, and improve the effectiveness of front-and -back-office activities ranging from sales to human resources (HR) to procurement.
Oracle's ERP Analytics help front line managers improve cash flow, control expenses, manage headcount and employee performance, stream-line spend and supply chain operations, and track the financial performance of major projects. Oracle's CRM Analytics provides fact-based insight into the entire sales process and into product demand, customer price sensitivity, and overall pricing effectiveness. They enable firms to manage and track campaign performance, and to segment and retain the most valuable customers. Organizations can assess the effectiveness of loyalty promotions and partner relationships, track and analyze key service center metrics, and generate a complete picture of contact center performance.
NOTE:
· SAP is not supported OOTB in the current release
· Informatica is the ETL tool that is used to populate the data warehouse from the OLTP systems
· In the current version, Essbase is not integrated for storing aggregated data. However this can be customized.
Essbase is placed between the two time lines intentionally. An Essbase cube can be used to store aggregated stored data as well as to analyze present data using excel along with Smartview. Essbase can also form a source for OBIEE where sophisticated analysis can be carried out.
NOTE: Essbase is not a solution to store transactional level data.
Essbase
Oracle Essbase is the industry-leading OLAP (online analytical processing) server. The newest release of Oracle's Hyperion Essbase product, Oracle Essbase provides an environment for rapidly developing custom analytic and enterprise performance management applications. With a rapid application development environment that is managed by the business, Oracle Essbase enables the business to quickly model complex business scenarios. For example, Oracle Essbase makes it easy for line-of-business personnel to develop and manage analytic applications that model complex scenarios, forecast the business and perform "what-if" analyses in order to look into the future. Oracle Essbase supports extremely fast query response times for vast numbers of users, for large data sets, and for complex business models. It is hot-pluggable across any data source.
· What will be the most likely project cost?
· In the Insurance business, given certain attributes of a person (eg. Job, Salary, Age, Locality etc), What is the person's risk profile?
· In a Call Center where a caller is ordering a product, would'nt it be nice if you can suggest what else this person may be interested in and create a up sell opportunity
All these are instances of Forecasting and Predictive Modeling. Three major products cater to this space, apart from the Hyperion Application products like Planning or financial management. Essbase itself provides forecasting and trending capabilities as discussed earlier.
Oracle Real-Time Decisions
Oracle's Real-Time Decisions (RTD) platform combines both rules and predictive analytics to power solutions for real-time enterprise decision management. It enables real-time intelligence to be instilled into any type of business process or customer interaction. A high-performance transactional server delivers real-time decisions and recommendations. This server automatically renders decisions within a business process and reveals insights, creating actionable intelligence from data flowing through the process in real time.
Oracle Crystal Ball
Oracle Crystal Ball is the leading spreadsheet-based application suite for predictive modeling, forecasting, simulation, and optimization. It gives you unparalleled insight into the critical factors affecting risk. With Crystal Ball, you can make the right tactical decisions to reach your objectives and gain a competitive edge under even the most uncertain market conditions.
Oracle Crystal Ball solutions begin with Oracle Crystal Ball, the base package for predictive modeling, Monte Carlo simulation and forecasting. Oracle Crystal Ball Enterprise Performance Management builds on that set of tools by adding the power of Oracle Crystal Ball to your Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) applications.
Oracle Data Mining
Oracle Data Mining (ODM)—an option to Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition—enables customers to produce actionable predictive information and build integrated business intelligence applications. Using data mining functionality embedded in Oracle Database 11g, customers can find patterns and insights hidden in their data. Application developers can quickly automate the discovery and distribution of new business intelligence—predictions, patterns and discoveries—throughout their organization.
Finally the enterprise wide static reporting solution would be BI Publisher.
Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Publisher
Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Publisher (formerly XML Publisher) is an enterprise reporting solution for authoring, managing, and delivering all your highly formatted documents, such as operational reports, electronic funds transfer documents, government PDF forms, shipping labels, checks, sales and marketing letters, and much more. Built on open standards, Oracle BI Publisher also allows IT Staff and developers to create data models against practically any data source and build custom reporting applications that leverage existing infrastructure. Oracle BI Publisher can generate tens of thousands of documents per hour with minimal impact to transactional systems. Reports can be designed using familiar desktop products and viewed online or scheduled for delivery to a wide range of destinations.
Oracle is the leader in Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), unifying Performance Management and Business Intelligence (BI), supporting a broad range of strategic, financial and operational management processes. Oracle provides a complete and integrated system for managing and optimizing enterprise-wide performance. This allows organizations to achieve a state of management excellence - being smart, agile and aligned - which provides competitive advantage and leverages their operational investments.
- Smart : Enable advanced integration that improves agility and lowers costs of ownership
- Agile: Integrate information from your financial performance management, operational intelligence, and transactional applications
- Aligned: Drive pervasive intelligence across the enterprise by linking strategic, financial and operational management processes
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