Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) 12c is packed full of features and has a fresh approach to information presentation, system management, and security. You will be introduced to these features, through a step-by-step guide to building a complete system from scratch. With this guide, you will be equipped with a basic understanding of what the product contains, how to install and configure it, and how to create effective business intelligence. This book contains the necessary information for a beginner to create a high performance OBIEE 12c system with effective presentation of information.
Chapter 1, Oracle BI 12C Architecture, reviews the key areas of the Oracle BI system and its Fusion Middleware architecture, with WebLogic at the core of the system.
Chapter 2, Installing the Prerequisite Software, covers the steps to install the software needed before we can install the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) software.
Chapter 3, Installing on Windows Server 2012, provides step-by-step instructions for installing Oracle BI 12c on Windows Server 2012.
Chapter 4, Reviewing the Features of the Reporting Repository, introduces the new interface of the catalog and the tools that are integrated into the presentation services. It also explores the various aspects of the catalog administration.
Chapter 5, Installing and Configuring Client Tools, focuses on installing the client software, configuring a connection to the OBIEE server and the database, creating shortcuts, and testing the client software.
Chapter 6, Understanding the Systems Management Tools, goes into greater detail about the system management tools that tie everything together. We'll explain what these components are, what they do, and how they work together. We delve into the navigation of these tools so that you become more familiar with the interfaces and learn what components are specific to Oracle BI 12c. We will also explore which key controls are used to maintain the Oracle BI 12c environment.
Chapter 7, Developing the BI Server Repository, covers the development of a simple RPD, from importing tables in a database through to how these objects are presented to us when we move on to creating an actual request.
Chapter 8, Creating Dashboards and Analyses, shows us how to create analyses, and how to present them on Dashboards. We demonstrate the various ways of representing and formatting data that are available, along with advice on best practices gained from implementation experience.
Chapter 9, Agents and Action Framework, looks at a few functions that Oracle BI provides in an attempt to help organizations succeed at moving a user from a transactional reporting mindset to an analytical one.
Chapter 10, Developing Reports Using BI Publisher, covers the main features of BI Publisher in order to get you up to speed in using the tool. We also mention some of the new features of 12c.
Chapter 11, Usage Tracking, describes how to activate the usage tracking feature and create useful reports from it. We also learn how to fine-tune and improve the usage tracking feature.
Chapter 12, Improving Performance, looks at some common techniques to reduce common bottlenecks that can exist in the process of delivering dashboards and reports to the users. We look across the whole system, defining poor performance, and, where required, show the steps to improve performance.
Chapter 13: Using the BI Admin Change Management Utilities,describes some of the other utilities in the Administration tool that can aid and simplify the development process.
Chapter 14: Ancillary Installation Options, highlights some of the most common post-configuration installation options and discusses many of the real-world implementations that we've experienced.
Chapter 15: Reporting Databases,covers a brief introduction to the theory and guidelines for creating a warehouse, and an example of creating a warehouse.
Chapter 16: Customizing the Style of Dashboards,shows how to change a style and how to create and implement a new style.
Chapter 17: Upgrading to 12c, covers how to utilize the Upgrade Assistant in order to migrate some of the core components to 12c.
To work through the steps in this book, you will need access to a Windows machine, preferably running Windows Server (but Windows 10 can cope), and a copy of SQL Server 2016. If you don’t have one, Microsoft has now released the SQL Server 2016 Developer Edition as a free download, and it will work just fine for working through the recipes.
You can download the developer edition from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-editions-developers or use the shortcut http://bit.ly/sql2016dev.
To mirror our setup, you also need the AdventureWorks 2014 multi-dimensional database. You can find the samples database at https://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/releases/view/125550.
You will also need to register an account on Oracle.com – don’t worry, its free!
If you would like to practice the install on Linux, then we recommend that you download the Oracle VirtualBox software and load an Oracle Linux virtual machine.
A wide variety of users will find this book valuable. If you are an IT professional, business analyst, project manager, and/or newcomer to Business Intelligence who wish to learn from self-paced professional guidance and actual implementation experience, this book is for you. Ultimately, this book is for anyone who needs a solid grounding in the subject of Oracle Business Intelligence.
Approach: this book will take you from one feature to another in a step-by-step manner and will teach how to create effective business intelligence using Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. You will be taught how to create BI solutions and dashboards from scratch. There will be multiple modules in the book, each module spread in chapters, each of which will cover each aspect of business intelligence in a systematic manner.
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, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Select the BI Publisher Reports folder, which you created in the previous exercise."
A block of code is set as follows:
select dg.DepartmentGroupName, d.CalendarYear, sum(f.Amount) from DimDepartmentGroup dg,
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
DECLARE @collate sysname SELECT @collate = convert(sysname, serverproperty('COLLATION')) IF ( charindex(N'_CI', @collate) > 0 ) BEGIN select @collate = replace(@collate, N'_CI', N'_CS')
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
C:Javajdk1.8.0_74binjava.exe -jar fmw_12.2.1.0.0_infrastructure.jar
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: "Click on the Save button."
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