OTBI vs. OBIA

Several people are curious about what are OTBI and OBIA, and what are the differences between OTBI and OBIA.  I will discuss these in this article.

OTBI stands for Oracle Transactional Buisness Intelligence. 

OBIA stands for Oracle Business Intelligence Applications.

Let’s start with OBIA.  OBIA is the pre-packaged BI Apps that Oracle has provided for several years.  It is the data warehouse based solution.  It is based on the universal data warehouse design with different prebuilt adapters that can connect to various source application to bring the data into the data warehouse.  It allows you to conslidate the data from various sources and bring them together.  It provides a library of metrics that help you measure your business. It also provides a set of predefined reports and dashboards.  OBIA works for multiple sources, including E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JDE, SAP, and Fusion Applications.

OTBI is different.  First of all, it is a real time BI.  There is no data warehouse or ETL process for OTBI.  Second, it is for Fusion Apps only.   OTBI is leveraging the advanced technologies from both BI platform and ADF to enable the online BI queries agains the Fusion Applications database directly.  In addition, in some area, such as Financial, you can also connect to the Essbase cubes.  Unlike OBIA, OTBI does not have a lot of prebuilt dashboards and reports.  The reason is that for some advanced analysis, the data need to be prepared.  You cannot get eveything you can get from the OBIA data warehouse in OTBI. 

Both OTBI and OBIA are available from the same metadata repository.  Some of the repository objects are shared between OTBI and OBIA.  It was designed to allow you have the following configurations:

• OTBI Only
• OBIA only
• OTBI and OBIA coexist

If you implement Fusion Apps, you can enable OTBI.  You can use the BI EE Answer to access the prebuild metadata and metrics those are built against the Fusion Apps.  You may not get the full powerful prebuild dashboard and repost and prebuilt navigation workflow.  However, you can start experiencing what the BI EE based reports look like.  You can start bring the data out from your OLTP system.  You can provide training to the users to get familar with the subject areas, some of which are shared with OBIA. 

If you enjoy OTBI and want to further get OBIA with a data warehouse based solution.  You can implement OBIA later.  Some of the OTBI reports maybe switched to run against OBIA.  Some of OTBI reports can continue connecting to Fusion Apps directly.  They can coexist in a single BI server and a single BI answer client.

Both OTBI and OBIA are accessing Fusion Apps via the ADF.   This is a more advanced topic. 

 

 

 

A good OBIEE web demo from New York City’s City Wide Performance Reporting

New York City now enables the public to monitor the city’s performance by making the OBIEE based dashboard and report online.

Here is the link to their CPR (City Wide Performance Reporting) site : http://www.nyc.gov/html/ops/cpr/html/home/home.shtml

Your questions about OBIEE or OBIA

Some people left me messages in my MeeboMe. If you have questions about Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition and Oracle BI Applictions. Here are the links to the public discussion forums:

Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition

Oracle BI Applications

A white paper on leveraging the power of UNSPSC for BI

I found a white paper on http://www.UNSPSC.org site about the same topic I wrote last week:

Here are what I learned about UNSPSC:

• It has a 4 level hierarchical structure. It can be used for drill down and roll up data.
• It is very useful for spend analysis.
• It can also be used in sourcing to identify the suppliers. It can be use to measure the supplier’s performance by grouping the supplier and establish the benchmark.
• It was an effort of merging United Nation’s code and D&B’s SPSC.
• It can be extended. The custom codes can be defined as the further breakdown of the standard code
• It supports multiple languages.

Key Roles involved in a BI Data Warehouse Project

To develop or deploy a BI solution for your organizations, you need to have the right people involved in the time time. Here are typical roles involved in a BI data warehouse project.

• Project Sponsor
• Project Manager
• Functional Analyst
• SME
• BI Architect
• ETL Developers
• DBA

The job description and responsibilities are listed in this table:

Use Oracle Instant Client for OBIEE

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.

BI EE Upgrade Survey in OracleBI Blog

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.

Oracle’s 11g Launch Impresses – Intelligent Enterprise

The Intelligence Enterprise’s weblog has a new article about Oracle 11g.  One thing worth highlighted is the feature he feel impressed about on the advancement of OLAP.

“Materialized views are a technique for speeding multidimensional queries, such as those exploring sales across regions, products and customers. However, as the number of materialized views mounts along with query volumes and complexity, managing those views becomes difficult. In 11g, Oracle is using an OLAP cube to store up to millions of materialized views so they can be managed more efficiently.”

One of the problems of the old materialized view is that  you have to know the level you are going to reported by and create the materialized view accordingly.  The benefit of using an OLAP engine is that the aggregation can be available at many different levels andyou do not need to created multiple specific materialized views for storing the summaries.   However, the OLAP cubes was stored in a different technology and populated in different languages.    You need to write codes to map the data from your source system or warehouse to the cubes.  The process needs to be run periodically in order to have the refreshed data from OLAP.  Also, querying the data from OLAP requires a different programming interface, unless you create the OLAP-to-Relational mapping view.

The new feature of 11g seems combining the best from both world and solve all the problems!

An evaluation of Oracle BI Enterprise Edition from Intelligent Enterprise

A good article from Intelligent Enterprise about the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition – Put to the test: Oracle BI Enterprise Edition.

Here is the part I feel worth highlight:

Oracle Business Intelligence EE 10.1.3.2 (MAUI) Documentation Library

This is the link to public available Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Version 10.1.3.2 Documentation Library.