Oracle Business Intelligence Tips Oracle Tips by Burleson Consulting

The term "Oracle business intelligence" refers to the process of delivering Oracle information in a format that lends itself to common business intelligence activities including online analytical processing (OLAP, multidimensional data representation), hypothesis testing, correlation analysis and data mining.  From an Oracle perspective, business intelligence involves storing data in a highly-denormalized form (a data warehouse "star" schema), and pre-joining tables and pre-summarizing data. 

Oracle Business Intelligence features

The tools used in an Oracle business intelligence application provide the illusion of instantaneous response time, as the queries are pre-materialized for fast access.  The Oracle business intelligence tools include:

• Star transformation table joins - This is a super-fast way to get results from a star schema.
   

• Partitioning - Oracle partitioning allows for a divide and conquer approach for very large data sets.
   

• Excel pivot tables - Third party tools such as Excel-DB allows for Oracle data to be loaded to MS Excel spreadsheets for fast OLAP analysis using pivot tables.
   

• Oracle Data Mining - The Oracle ODM offering allows for advanced hypothesis testing and multivariate chi-square analysis, including cohort analysis using Bayesian techniques.  Also, see Dr. Hamm's book "Oracle Data Mining", the authoritative reference on Oracle business intelligence with data mining.
   

• Materialized views - Materialized views (with automatic query re-write) allows the Oracle business intelligence professional to create pre-aggregated summaries

Oracle Business Intelligence Products

The catch-all term of Oracle business intelligence can have many meanings within Oracle and Oracle offers many BI products:

• Oracle Data Warehouse Builder (OWB) - The OWB is a business intelligence tool that assists in the loading and management of the underlying business intelligence data warehouse.
   

• Oracle Business Intelligence Suite - This tool allows for multidimensional data display and aggregation, similar to spreadsheet pivot tables.
   

Oracle Business Intelligence tools and resources

Whether you write your own Oracle business intelligence solution or buy an Oracle BI product, there are several popular 3rd party tools:

• Oracle Business Intelligence 10g Training

Oracle Discoverer BI training

Oracle Discoverer - Introduction to business intelligence

Oracle Warehouse Builder - Business Intelligence ETL

Planning the Oracle Warehouse for business intelligence

Oracle Online Analytical Processing OLAP

• Excel-DB for Oracle OLAP
   

• Ion for Oracle predictive analysis

 

If you like Oracle Business Intelligence, see my book "Oracle Tuning: The Definitive Reference", with 950 pages of Oracle OLAP, materialized views and business intelligence tips and scripts.  You can buy it direct from the publisher for 30%-off and get instant access to the code depot of Oracle tuning scripts.