Re: Preliminary research for Oracle BI installation

From: Maxim Demenko <mdemenko_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 29 Sep 2007 22:43:15 +0200
Message-ID: <46FEB8E3.4070304@gmail.com>

EdStevens schrieb:
> I have been asked to put together a list of requirements to stand up
> an Oracle Business Intelligence installation. After poking around
> MetaLink I find I'm just spinning my wheels trying to determine which
> of various editions of BI we would want, and what database options are
> required to support it. Having been strictly a relational database
> DBA, I don't even have a good grasp of what I've been reading.
>
> At this point, I think the questions I need answers for are:
>
> 1) How do I determine which edition of BI (Enterprise Edition Plus,
> Standard Edition One, or Standard Edition) would be appropriate?
>
> 2) For a given edition of BI, what options need to be installed on the
> source OLTP database? The data warehouse data base?
>
> Thanks.
>

Ed, i'm not by far BI expert, only had a small touch with some products, so maybe (very likely) somebody more knowledgeable points me wrong, but i'll try my best ;-)
1) There are a lot of BI information sources available, some are very good as for my taste (of course, Oracle related ;-))

http://www.rittmanmead.com/
http://oraclebi.blogspot.com/
http://oraclesponge.blogspot.com/

Mark Rittman has a dedicated forum, where you can register and ask the same question, he is definitely an Expert, so you probably get a very detailed explanation.
Regarding the products, EE is a very comprehesive suite, but shortly taken - the core is formerly known Siebel Analytics (has nothing to do with Siebel OLTP) - very powerful reporting engine, if i am not wrong, Informatica (OEM) is included as ETL tool and on top BI Publisher ( former XML Publisher - very slick reporting tool). From what i read - they are the flagships of BI tools, having corresponding price as well. Standard Edition One is based on old good Oracle Discoverer and Reporting Services, OWB covers the ETL part. I think, the Discoverer is very popular by certain user layer and can cover a lot of BI requirements. Not to mention, Oracle is doing very intensive work to integrate all its BI tools together (like OWB and Discoverer, Oracle Publisher and Discoverer and so on), so if this is only a start, i personally would go the SE route and later upgrade to EE only if business requirements can not be covered - lastly it is mostly the question of money ( and, of course , qualified staff). That means, you have to clarify first, what are the requirements for BI suite, who is supposed to work with, how familiar are people with tools and what is supposed budget. Regarding intrusion into OLTP - to my knowledge, no of bi tools require something like this - the usual setup ( as well very simplified ) - you deploy a Datawarehouse, etl tool to move your oltp data, a database as repository for reporting engine (like Discoverer or Siebel Analytics) - nothing gets installed directly into OLTP.

Best regards

Maxim Received on Sat Sep 29 2007 - 15:43:15 CDT