Oracle BI

Answers
And
Interactive Dashboards

Submitted By,

Dheeraj Rekula

Bhavik Shah
What is OBI EE?
Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, also known as OBI EE, is Oracle's set of
business Intelligence tools consisting of former Siebel business intelligence
and Hyperion business intelligence offerings.
OBI EE in combination with Essbase is a complete, open and architecturally unified solution for
the enterprise that delivers capabilities for reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, OLAP,
dashboards and scorecards. All enterprise data sources, as well as metrics, calculations,
definitions and hierarchies are managed in a Common Enterprise Information Model, providing
users with accurate and consistent insight of the data. Users can access and interact with
information in multiple ways, including web-based interactive dashboards, collaboration
workspaces, search bars, ERP and CRM applications, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office
applications.

Benefits
Comprehensive BI functionality built on a unified infrastructure: Reduce cost and increase
productivity with a common infrastructure for producing and delivering enterprise reports,
scorecards, dashboards, ad hoc analysis, and OLAP analysis

Powerful user experience: Increase user adoption with a powerful, task-oriented navigation
framework. Features such as rich visualization, interactive dashboards, a vast range of animated
charting options, OLAP style interactions and innovative search and actionable collaboration
capabilities deliver an unrivaled end-user experience

Unified business model: Ensure that all metrics, calculations and definitions are uniformly
consistent to provide better alignment and visibility across the organization

Hot-Pluggable: Integrate with all popular extraction, transformation and load tools, databases,
business applications, application servers, security tools, enterprise portals, and desktop tools

Best-in-class scalability, reliability and performance: Optimize performance while

simplifying systems configuration and lifecycle management. An integrated systems
management console provides superior scalability, high availability, and security benefits, while
making upgrades and systems management effortless
Team Objective
OBI EE has many features to it. We would like to demonstrate the functioning of Oracle’s
Answers and Interactive Dashboards.

Functionality of OBI EE
OBI EE Architecture

OBI EE Architecture contains four layers

 Client and User Interface

 Presentation Server and Presentation Catalog
 BI Server
 Data Sources

Client and User Interface

The Interface has several components like OBI EE Answers, Interactive Dashboards and BI
Delivers which are accessible to the clients and users.

 Oracle BI Answers: It is a powerful, ad hoc query and analysis tool that works against a
logical view of Information from multiple data sources in a pure web environment.
 Oracle BI Interactive Dashboards: These are Interactive Web pages that display
personalized, role based Information to guide users to precise and effective decisions.
  Oracle BI Delivers: It is an alerting engine which gives users flexibility to schedule their
reports and get them delivered to their handheld devices such as mobile phones or
Interactive dashboards
Presentation Server and Presentation catalog
The Presentation server is a web server on which the OBI EE web application runs. It processes
the client request and routes it to the BI server and vice versa.
The Presentation catalog stores application dashboards, folders and filters. It contains
Information regarding the permissions of dashboards and reports created by the users. It is
created when the presentation server starts and can be administered using the tool called catalog
manager.
Both, Presentation layer and Presentation catalog are together responsible for providing the
clients with a web server on which the web applications run and also administer the look and feel
of the User Interface.
BI Server
BI server is a highly scalable and analysis server. It efficiently integrates data from multiple
relational, unstructured, OLAP application sources, both oracle and non oracle.
It interacts with the presentation server over TCP/IP and takes the reporting request from the
presentation server. Then it processes the request and form logical and physical queries and this
is sent to the underlying data source from which the data is processed.
Administrator Tool
The BI server makes use of the BI repository for converting the user request into logical and
physical queries. The BI repository is a metadata using which the server gets the Information of
the joins and filters to be used in the query. It is the backbone of the architecture.
The BI repository is created using Administrator tool. It contains 3 layers

 Physical layer: It contains the tables imported from the underlying DB with appropriate
joins between them.
 Business Model and Mapping layer: Business logic is Implemented on this layer such
as calculations, Hierarchies etc.
 Presentation Layer: This layer is used for presentation of required tables and columns to
the users. The columns pulled in this layer are directly visible to the user on Presentation
services.
Data Sources
OBI EE has got capability of reporting on multiple databases and also multiple types of
databases like XML, Oracle, SQL Server.
To select a Data source, a system DSN has to be created and imported into the physical layer of
the Administrator tool.
Data source used for demonstration
AdventureWorksDW2008R2 is the sample schema that we are going to use for this
demonstration.
The AdventureWorksDW2008R2 sample data warehouse is specifically built to demonstrate the
business intelligence features that are available in SQL Server. The data in the data warehouse
has been trended to support both data mining and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
scenarios.
The following OLAP scenarios are considered for this demonstration.
1. Promotion Effectiveness: Supports the scenario of analyzing how promotions affect
sales performance.
2. Sales Force Performance: Supports the scenario of tracking the variance between sales
quotas and actual sales.
3. Trend and Growth Analysis: Supports the scenario of analyzing how the current period
compares to prior periods in terms of sales.

Functionality Processing
The following Information has a general explanation of how the OLAP scenarios are
implemented.

Installation of OBIEE v.10.1.3.4.1

 Follow the link and Download the appropriate version
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bi-enterprise-edition/downloads/business-
intelligence-10g-165415.html
 Install JDK v.1.6 or higher version
 Follow the Instruction on OBI EE setup configuration wizard to install it.

Operation
How to Create Data Source??

 Go to “Administrative Tools” in “Control Panel”

 Click ODBC (Data source). Then click System DSN tab and the click Add to import
SQL Server.
 Give Data Source an appropriate name and mention the Server Name you want to
connect to wherever it is required. Click “Next”
 Select the Table you want to Import. Click “Finish”
Operation of Administrator tool

 Open the Administrator tool in the Start menu.

 Go to File and click “New” to create a new repository and name it appropriately.
Administrator is the default Username. Give it your own password. Once this process is
finished, the three different layers of the Administrator tool are visible.
 Go to File and click import to connect to the SQL Server DSN which we created
previously. Select the tables which we want to import and click ‘Finish’ button.
 The selected tables are visible on the Physical layer.
 Select an OLAP scenario and drag the tables supporting the respective OLAP scenario
into the Business Model and Mapping layer.
 Form various Dimensions and Hierarchies for Dimension tables. Perform Aggregations
on facts.
 Make the Business model available for queries and drag it into the Presentation layer.
 Check for consistency and save it.
Operation of Answers & Dashboards

 Go to “NQSConfig.INI” File. Change the default repository name to the repository file
you are currently using
 Start the Presentation server and the BI server in the control panel.
 Start “Presentation Services” in the Start menu. Give Username as “Administrator”
and “Password”, similar to the respective repository password in the NQSConfig.INI
file.
 Open the tables and click the necessary columns which we want to view. Make graphs
and charts and save them.
 Go to “Dashboard” and edit it to add the view you just formed and save it.
  This will give the Answers on the Dashboard.

Oracle BI Java Host, Oracle BI Presentation Services, Oracle BI Server should be started after the after the repository name is
given in the NQSconfig.ini file
NQSconfig.INI