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.
Dylan's BI Study Notes 