Book Image

Oracle Business Intelligence : The Condensed Guide to Analysis and Reporting

By : Yuli Vasiliev
Book Image

Oracle Business Intelligence : The Condensed Guide to Analysis and Reporting

By: Yuli Vasiliev

Overview of this book

Business Intelligence (BI) is the process of obtaining business information from available data and today, most businesses use BI to control their affairs. With Business Analysis and Reporting in Oracle Business Intelligence, you can quickly learn how to put the power of the Oracle Business Intelligence solutions to work. To jump start with analysis and reporting of data on an Oracle Business Intelligence SE platform and to keep the process of learning simple and interesting requires numerous annotated examples.The examples in this introductory guide will make you immediately familiar with tools included in the Oracle Business Intelligence package. This book will teach you how to find answers to common business questions and make informed business decisions as well as helping you to use Oracle Business Intelligence SE platform and prepare database for analysis. This practical, example-rich guide starts by explaining concepts behind getting business information from data. We then move smoothly onto the tools included in the Oracle Business Intelligence SE and Oracle Business Intelligence Tools packages. Along the way, we will look at how to take advantage of Discoverer Administrator, Discoverer Plus, and Discoverer Viewer for analysis and reporting. You will also learn how to build, deploy and execute reports using Oracle Reports, and integrate data from different data sources with warehousing, employing Oracle Warehouse Builder software. Covering advanced Oracle Business Intelligence features, this book will teach you how to pivot data, drill it up and down, as well as display it visually in graphs.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Oracle Business Intelligence: The Condensed Guide to Analysis and Reporting
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Using analytic SQL functions


Analytic SQL is one of those Oracle Database native features that you can start using immediately after installing the database. Of course, you will also need some data stored in the database to play with. However, the data available in the demonstration database schemas can be quite enough to begin with.

Answering simple questions

As stated earlier, there are business questions that can be answered with a simple SQL query issued against the database. Questions starting with "how many" are a good example. Often, to answer such questions, you can use the COUNT SQL function. For example, you might need to know how many employees in your organization have been working for the company for 15 years or more. In this example, you might query the employees table located in the hr/hr demonstration schema, issuing the following statement:

SELECT count(*) FROM employees WHERE (EXTRACT(YEAR FROM (SYSDATE)) - EXTRACT(YEAR FROM (hire_date))) >= 15;

The output should look...