Preface

This guide introduces readers to Oracle Business Intelligence. It provides an overview of what you can do with Oracle Business Intelligence, and it explains concepts that you need to understand as you plan to implement a business intelligence solution.

Audience

Oracle Business Intelligence Concepts Guide is intended for information consumers, report creators, analysts, data providers, DBAs, and application developers who perform the following tasks:

Use data analysis to help make business decisions
Develop custom reports for their own use and for other users
Prepare data for analysis
Administer Oracle Database for a business intelligence system
Develop custom solutions for analyzing data stored in an Oracle database

To use this document, you need no prior experience with business intelligence software.

Documentation Accessibility

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Structure

This guide is structured as follows:

Chapter 1, "The Oracle Business Intelligence Solution"

This chapter provides a general introduction to business intelligence and shows you how Oracle Business Intelligence helps you answer business questions. It is written for business users and IT professionals.

Chapter 2, "Technical Fundamentals for Implementation"

This chapter describes fundamental concepts for building a business intelligence solution with Oracle Business Intelligence. It focuses on data structures and metadata for reporting and describes options for reporting tools and delivery mechanisms. This chapter is written primarily for IT professionals.

Chapter 3, "Example Implementations"

This chapter provides sample scenarios for two different Oracle Business Intelligence solutions. It is written primarily for IT professionals.

Appendix A, "Oracle Business Intelligence Packaging"

This appendix lists the components of different Oracle Business Intelligence packages.

Oracle By Example Series

The Oracle By Example (OBE) series provides hands-on, step-by-step instructions on how to implement various technology solutions to business problems. OBE contains numerous lessons on Business Intelligence from its Web site at:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/start/bi.html

Following is a list of some of these lessons.

OracleBI Discoverer

The OracleBI Discoverer area includes these and other lessons:

Creating Business Intelligence Reports Using OracleBI Discoverer Plus OLAP
Analyzing Sales History Information using OracleBI Discoverer Plus Relational
Viewing Sales History Information Using OracleBI Discoverer Viewer
Creating a Business Intelligence Dashboard Using OracleBI Discoverer Portlets

OracleBI Spreadsheet Add-In

The OracleBI Spreadsheet Add-In are includes this lesson:

Using the OracleBI Spreadsheet Add-In

OracleBI Beans

The OracleBI Beans area include these lessons:

Develop Business Intelligence Applications Using OracleBI Beans
Develop Business Intelligence Objects Using OracleBI Beans

Oracle Reports

The Oracle Reports area includes these and other lessons:

Creating a Report Using the Report Wizard
Creating a Graph Using the Graph Wizard
Applying Conditional Formatting in a Paper Report
Applying Conditional Formatting in the JSP Web Source

Oracle Warehouse Builder

The Oracle Warehouse Builder area these and other lessons:

Importing Source Metadata
Defining a Target Module
Dimensional Design Using Oracle Warehouse Builder
Designing ETL Data Flow Mapping
Designing Process Flows

Oracle Database: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing

The Oracle Business Intelligence platform area includes these and other lessons:

ETL Infrastructure Inside Oracle Database 10g
Populating Your OLAP Analytic Workspace Using Analytic Workspace Manager
Solving Business Problems with Oracle Data Mining
Using Basic Database Functionality for Data Warehousing

Conventions

The following text conventions are used in this document:

Convention	Meaning
boldface	Boldface type indicates graphical user interface elements associated with an action, or terms defined in text or the glossary.
italic	Italic type indicates book titles, emphasis, or placeholder variables for which you supply particular values.
`monospace`	Monospace type indicates commands within a paragraph, URLs, code in examples, text that appears on the screen, or text that you enter.