Dylan’s BI Study Notes

My notes about Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, OLAP, and Master Data Management

  • About me

    I am a senior development manager working for Oracle BI Applications development. My job involves the common area, including data warehouse modeling and dimension conformance. I was involved in Oracle E-Business Suite Financial Architecture, Oracle Customer Hub, and Oracle Fusion Projects product development in the past. Disclaimer: Opinions expressed in this blog are entirely my own and do not reflect the position of Oracle.

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Archive for August, 2007

Oracle BI Applications version 7.9.3 is now available on OTN

Posted by Dylan Wan on August 20, 2007

It is great to hear that Oracle BI Applications version 7.9.3 is now available on Oracle Technology Network for download. - Oracle Business Intelligence (10.1.3.X) download web site.

The technical note 676: Summary of Enhancements and New Features in Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Version 7.9.3 is also available on supportweb.siebel.com. The highlights of the key features introduced in this release are as follows: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in BI, BI Application, BI Work, Business Intelligence, OBIEE, Oracle, Oracle BI Suite EE, Siebel Analytics | No Comments »

Use Oracle Instant Client for OBIEE

Posted by Dylan Wan on August 16, 2007

Oracle BI Server shipped the Oracle Merant ODBC Driver from DataDirect technology.  The ODBC driver files are stored under X:\OracleBI\DAC\oraclemerantodbc

It does a license check so you may receive a warning when you connect to a non-Siebel database.  I received a message when I tried to recalculate the row count in the Oracle BI Server Administration Tool for connecting to a non-Siebel database..

I just installed the Oracle ODBC Instant Client to solve this problem.  It does not require Oracle Home and the installation is very simple.  It took less then 10 minutes for downloading and installing the files.

I do not have a ORACLE_HOME in my machine since I am using the Oracle XE.  The only problem I have found for using XE is that BIEE and XE are running different OC4J servers so I have multiple web server instances on my machines.  Fortunately Oracle Express takes the port 8080 as the default and the OC4J for analytics is running under the port 9704, so they are not conflicting with each other.

To run the Oracle BI Application, you don’t need to install a separate application server.  The OC4J server is packaged with the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition platform and you can put your web page files under X:\OracleBI\oc4j_bi\j2ee\home\default-web-app.

Posted in BI Links, OBIEE, Oracle, Oracle BI Suite EE | 1 Comment »

BI EE Upgrade Survey in OracleBI Blog

Posted by Dylan Wan on August 16, 2007

If you are using Oracle BI EE/Apps, you have a chance to provide your feedback to Oracle about the upgrade to the next release.   You can fill the form - BI EE Upgrade survey available in OracleBI Blog.

Posted in BI, BI Application, BI Links, OBIEE, Oracle, Oracle BI Suite EE | 1 Comment »

Customer Dimension and CRM related Analytics

Posted by Dylan Wan on August 14, 2007

Why is the customer dimension so important?

  • A well-maintained, well-deployed conforming customer dimension is the cornerstone of sound customer centric analysis

What are special characteristics of the customer dimension?

  • Customer dimension is extremely deep. It may have million rows.
  • Customer dimension is extremely wide. It has hundreds of attributes.
  • Customer dimension changes often. It is not really a slowly changing dimension. It is sometimes called as rapidly changing monster dimension.
  • Keeping the historical images of the customer data is important.
  • The data in the customer dimension come from multiple sources. Matching, de-dup, standardization among different sources is critical for successfully conforming the dimension.
  • The customer dimension with data may be enriched from the external data.
  • Customer data is the source for other dimensions - geography, industry, lines of business, etc.
  • You have to comply with the privacy regulation.
  • The data from external source may be only licensed for a period of time. The external data need to be associated with your own internal data for analysis for special purposes and the data need to be removed from your database.
  • The customer dimension itself is actually a source of fact tables. For example, # of customer living in California with the breakdown by age groups.

Posted in BI, BI Work, Business Intelligence, CDH, CDI, Customer Data Integration, Customer Intelligence, Data Warehouse, MDM, Marketing Intelligence, Master Data Management, Sales Intelligence, Service Intelligence, UCM | No Comments »

Recent posts on my MDM blog

Posted by Dylan Wan on August 8, 2007

Good information comes from good data.  The quality of your data warehouse relies on a good master data management (MDM) solution.   Here are some of important concepts in any MDM application.  I explain more of them in my MDM blog - http://groups.google.com/group/MDM-us.

Survivorship - what is this?

Cross Referencing - why do we need it?

Posted in CDH, CDI, Customer Data Integration, Data Warehouse, MDM, Master Data Management, UCM | No Comments »