In the last 15 years, some of us have witnessed mail becoming e-mail, grocery stores becoming www.store, and step-by-step technology becoming part of our daily life.
Technology development has radically changed the enterprise's way of doing business. First, daily tasks such as sales, client, and vendor management became computerized, and now all the resources are managed by enterprise applications. But this type of daily task support proved not to be enough for the business process, especially in the case of big organizations, which ended up with all kinds of applications, according to their vast field of activities. At some point they realized the need for some unified point of view. The choice was between replacing some applications and providing an integration process tool. Thus, Business Intelligence (BI) appeared in the scene. BI uses many types of data input, it doesn't take any note (if not necessary) of department, organization, or specific activities, and provides a unique answer for the corporate level.
Business Intelligence, in this way has become essential in most organizations. The goal in the near future is to support more effective business processes. Initially, it was used only for analysis and predictions based on the historical data; however, the new tendency of BI is to be actively involved in the business process. Integration seems to be the key to exploring the business possibilities, and providing the right tools seems to be the necessary step for an advanced business management.
In response to fast-growing demands, software development companies have come up with complex solutions, which can be used to plan, manage, and analyze a company's resources.
Somewhere in between, or being an active part for both the business process and software development, is the IT consultant. He has to stay in touch with the latest technologies, business solutions, and tools. He is an important factor when it comes to advising a company to adopt a new technology, a new tool, or a new vision concerning the IT field. There are two main categories of IT professionals involved in the process of providing these tools—the software developers and the report developers.
Having in mind the report developer's point of view, I will go through explaining the Business Intelligence concept—definition and process, Oracle BI, and finally an important component of Oracle BI—the Oracle BI Publisher—the document factory from Oracle.
Business Intelligence (BI) is the process of transforming data gathered from all the business data sources into decision support business information. Most companies gather data from their business activity, even using ERP and legacy applications with different databases. The amount of data input depends on the software tools used. Data characteristics depend on the company's structure, such as departments or activity profile. At this point, the complex process of data processing and formatting, which is necessary to generate even a simple report becomes visible. The need for a tool to process the amount of data gathered becomes visible, as well.
The first thing that makes you think about a BI solution is the lack of information needed for the good course of the business process. Answers to questions such as these are very important:
Which are my best suppliers?
How much will it cost to start a new product's production?
Where does all the money go?
The very first technical request to be accomplished is the data input quality. You won't have a good result if you have nothing to start with.
Another factor to be considered is the cost of a BI software implementation. This could be an expensive investment both from the perspective of time and financial resources.
For a software application to work as a BI solution, it has to provide tools for the following:
Data mining
OLAP (Online Analytical Processing)
ETL (extract, transform, load)
Predictive analytics
Business performance management
Reporting
The reporting tool has to be flexible enough to allow the creation of reports, charts, or dashboards along with running and scheduling them at different access levels. It has to allow reports viewing, printing, and saving in many formats. Integration with other products like Microsoft Office is also important.
For a better understanding of how the described tools work together, take a look at the following figure:
As you can see, the process begins with the corresponding data of the business. There are a lot of data sources types, such as databases and operational applications, and local data sources such as spreadsheets and XML files.
An ETL (or ELT, if you focus on Oracle Data Integrator) tool will perform the BI data integration process. In this way, the Data becomes accessible to the BI solution's end user.
The data warehouse is the central point of the BI solution. This contains structured data–detailed and consistent–for query analysis, and provides support for all BI operations from data mining to reporting. Unlike the Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) databases, data warehouses have a very different design to support a large amount of data (which does not need validation in this case), only a small number of users, and at the same time a particular access to the data depending on the particular queries that have to be processed. The historical data coming from business transaction processes is stored using a structure based on business entities, such as customer, product, and time.
The result of the business intelligence process is also visible through dashboards, analysis, reports, alerts, scorecards, and all these being available in a variety of designs and formats according to the end user requests.
As an introduction to the BI software world, here is a list of suggestions of actual software offers available in the market:
Oracle BI
SAP Business Objects
Microsoft BI
IBM
SAS
Microstrategy
Actuate 7
JasperSoft
Olik View
Among the leading industry of BI software, Oracle's solution was designed to address the entire spectrum of analytical requirements facing businesses including information access, analysis and reporting, and data integration and management.
Oracle's offer could be divided into two main categories of software:
Oracle BI Tools and Technologies : It includes Oracle BI Foundation Suite, Oracle BI Enterprise Edition, Oracle Essbase, Oracle BI Publisher, Oracle Scorecard and Strategy Management, Oracle BI Standard Edition One, and Oracle Real-Time Decisions.
Oracle BI Applications : These are built on OBIEE platform. Oracle BI Applications also include CRM Analytics and ERP Analytics applications. These solutions, being smart, agile, and aligned, will provide support for companies to achieve management excellence.
Oracle has also acquired Hyperion to expand their BI solution. The company claimed to be a leader in Enterprise Performance Management, by unifying Performance Management and BI solutions. It will support a broad range of strategic, financial, and operational management processes.
In the following sections, we will see how the Oracle BI solution maps to the Business Intelligence concept, including a short introduction to some Oracle BI components.
This refers to all data coming from sources interacting with the Oracle Business Intelligence server. Oracle BI supports Oracle Database, Oracle E-Business Suite and other Oracle based sources, IMB DB2 Database, Microsoft SQL Server, SAP NetWeaver BI, Microsoft Excel, flat files, ODBC sources, and XML data sources.
Data integration products are used to improve the speed of handling data, to reduce business process execution times, and to reduce development costs. Oracle Data Integrator combines all the elements of data integration to provide timely, accurate, and consistent information, which are as follows:
Real-time and bulk data movement
Transformation
Synchronization
Data quality
Data management
Data service
Oracle Dashboards are in fact customized points of access for analytics information. According to the user's requests, the personalized information displayed is used in the decision making process. The resulting Web interface is provided to users according to their group membership and permissions.
This is the OLAP server. The Oracle BI server collects and aggregates information from all, even disparate data sources. It provides services to the other components, and processes the request, forming queries, and sending these queries to the underlying data source for processing. A very important factor in this case is the time of response, for the user to access immediately the answer to complex business questions, to be able to simulate various complex business scenarios
Oracle BI server is the heart that drives all the other components.
Providing queries for the BI server, BI Answers is an ad hoc query and analysis tool. The web environment used is the gate to interactive charts, pivot tables, reports, and dashboards for the user. The user can save, modify, or format his view of information through the BI Answers tool.
Based on analytics results, BI Delivers creates alerts. Specified results can be detected within reports and the triggered alerts can be sent via multiple channels including e-mail, dashboards, and mobile devices. The notified dashboards can again trigger other alerts, resulting in a very close monitoring device for the business process.
Alerts are being sent to users based on a subscribing service.
This tool provides the ability to set a goal at the management level, to trace, and to apply all related activities involved in reaching the objective. The performance is monitored through Key Performance Indicators (KPI) , and many visualization types like KPI watch lists, maps, strategy trees, and diagrams are provided.
Oracle BI Publisher (formerly known as XML Publisher) is a reporting engine based on a very versatile open source language : XML. It can access relational, OLAP, and other data sources; in fact any data sources mapped to Oracle BI server.
It enables the creation, management, and delivery of all kinds of operational reports, financial reports, and any other customer-facing documents.
The result, consisting of high fidelity and highly formatted documents is delivered in a wide diversity of formats, such as: PDF, Excel, RTF, HTML, and electronic transfer documents. The results can be viewed online, saved for further processing, can be e-mailed, can be sent over FTP or scheduled for a delivery by, and for, a wide range of users and destinations.
However, the most important feature of Oracle BI Publisher is the fact that the report developer (not necessarily the software developer) is able to choose data sources and design the necessary reports.
The result types a user can get from Oracle BI are:
Interactive dashboard: Provides with security, driven navigation
Ad hoc analysis and interactive reporting: Provides with metrics, hierarchies, and calculations
Enterprise reporting: It is provided by BI Publisher
Proactive detection and alert: The alert engine can trigger workflows based on business events and notify stakeholders via their preferred medium or channel, such as: on the cell phone, via e-mail, a PDF file, or an Excel file
Actionable Intelligence: The business process can be invoked from within the BI platform
Microsoft Office integration: Information can be passed from Oracle BI to Microsoft Office documents such as Excel, Word, or Power Point
Spatial Intelligence: It is provided via map-based visualization
Scorecard and strategy management: Communicates strategic goals across the organization and monitors the process over time
Server based query, reporting, and analysis: Provided by Oracle BI Server, which generates a query optimized from each data source, aggregates them, and presents the result.
This book introduces Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher 11g, providing a suite of examples to help illustrate its main functionalities. Here is a synopsis of what you will find in the book:
Chapter 1, What's New in Oracle BI Publisher 11g, is a short presentation of Oracle BI Publisher 11g, with focus on the differences between the 10g release and the 11g release.
Chapter 2, Creating a Data Model for a Report, explains how Data Model Editor – the new feature provided by BI Publisher 11 – looks and works.
Chapter 3, Multiple Data Sources, describes how BI Publisher retrieves and structures the data used for a report.
Chapter 4, Report Layout Template, is about data presentation, which include layout types, visual components of the report, and template types.
Chapter 5, The New XPT Format introduces the new report format used by Oracle BI Publisher 11g. It generates almost pixel perfect output and could be a good substitute for PDF forms.
Chapter 6, Oracle BIP Template Builder for Microsoft Word, describes layout designing in MS Word.
Chapter 7, The Report Cconfiguration, demonstrates how reports are managed, and how to view, run, or set properties for reports.
Chapter 8, Exploring BI Publisher 11g: A Simple Report Example, is a simple report example. It presents an example, covering all the steps described in the previous chapters.
Chapter 9, BI Publisher 11g and E-Business Suite, discusses integration with Oracle e-Business Suite.
Appendix A, Report Translations, is a walk through all the translation techniques that BI Publisher offers.
Appendix B, Migrating Oracle Reports to BI Publisher, describes the steps required to migrate Oracle Reports to BI Publisher Reports.
Appendix C, Debugging Oracle Reports to BIP Migration, deals with an error that frequently occurs in Oracle Reports to BIP migration process. The neccesary steps required to correct this type of error are described here.
Appendix D, Glossary, a short list of BI Publisher specific terms, for a better understanding of the concepts explained.
You need to have the following:
A database installed. Supported database types include Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server, and IBM DB2
Oracle Business Intelligence schemas installed using Repository Creation Utility (RCU) 11.1.1.3.
You need to have access to Oracle BI Publisher 11g (installed as stand alone or as part of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g)
BIPublisher_11.1.1.3_Desktop
Microsoft Word
Microsoft Excel
Adobe Reader
An HTML Browser (Internet Explorer 7.0 or above, or Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3 or above recommended)
Reports are often the most visible output of a software application, with a great impact for the decisional process. So it is very important that the information on a report is accurate. Providing this is the report developer who has to be skilled in both designing the layout for the report and understanding the report's data sources.
Although, there is no need to have prior experience with BI Publisher 11g to read this book, it is desirable for a report developer to know the basics of SQL, entity-relationship model (ERM), programming logic, and concepts of BI.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "You can see the distinctive parts of the data template file, such as: dataQuery containing SQL statements and dataStructure containing groups and elements."
A block of code is set as follows:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<dataTemplate name="AR_RECEIPT" version="1.0">
<properties>
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus, or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".
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