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May 31, 2003

Oracle Drill Down

Already a dominant player in data management, Oracle is on a quest to deliver the business intelligence "stack" as a tightly integrated whole. Is the sum greater than the parts for your business analysis needs?

by Jack Hakim and Tom Spitzer

Data management infrastructure isn't what gets business users and power analysts excited. Yet, as IT executives and database managers know, business intelligence (BI) and analytic software aren't worth much without a solid foundation, which in most cases centers on DBMS implementation. In our previous article ("The Oracle Way," March 1, 2003), we discussed in detail how Oracle is consolidating and integrating BI functionality into the Oracle9i platform. We covered the topic by focusing on the database platform and how 9i's SQL engine works with Oracle Data Mining, Oracle9i Warehouse Builder, online analytic processing (OLAP), and the OLAP Catalog. Our conclusion was that Oracle's integration of this diverse set of technologies was not yet complete, but the company's progress in expanding the potential of data management was impressive.

In this second feature, we turn our attention to the tools and technologies that enable programmers to build analytic applications, and business decision makers to perform strategic analysis against large amounts of data effectively. We will focus primarily on Oracle's portfolio: However, many of the interfaces and other technology also allow you to use popular third-party BI software instead.

The best way to begin looking at Oracle's toolset is as layers of options. At the top is Oracle Discoverer, a general-purpose BI product that comes in desktop, Web reporter, and Web viewer versions. A second layer features the analytic tools that come with Oracle eBusiness Suite, which are tailored for solutions that address specific business functions and verticals. At a third layer, Oracle offers the means to build custom analytic applications for more special purpose solutions. You can use BI Beans components to recreate your own custom plus version of Discoverer. An alternative at this layer is to purchase a BI product from a third-party developer who has built a solution with BI Beans. At a fourth layer, to develop custom applications based on Oracle's embedded data mining technology, you would use Oracle Data Mining (ODM) Components and the ODM Browser, which we discussed extensively in our previous article (see Resources). Finally, Oracle's OLAP API lets you manipulate and customize multidimensional elements directly to extend functionality beyond what's possible using BI Beans.

Oracle's current multilevel approach provides a "good enough whole solution" and the advantages of having it all come from a single vendor. For organizations that have Oracle products and don't require heterogenous solutions, this option avoids many of the integration costs and difficulties of mixed environments. In the following sections, we'll take a closer look at each of these "layers" — with the exception of ODM, which we covered in the first feature.

Discoverer

Along with providing standard BI features, Discoverer uses its privileged position to take advantage of Oracle's data management infrastructure and SQL analytic functions to create, for example, period-over-period comparisons and other analytic queries. As with third-party products of its type, Discoverer's usability depends on a knowledgeable administrator who can evaluate how well certain types of queries will perform, determine what business abstractions are needed, and set the right level of granularity for each business component.

Discoverer Administrator, which resides in the Discoverer End User Layer (EUL), lets the administrator define the necessary metadata. The EUL is a metadata repository and query management engine that supports Discoverer and other reporting and information retrieval applications. The most visible function of the EUL is to permit administrators, through a folder metaphor, to represent relational and multidimensional database elements as common business entities. Folders contain data items that describe business entities, such as products, patients, or promotions. The items in a folder correspond to the measures and dimensions that generally populate OLAP cubes. To build queries and reports, users can work with the business terms rather than with the underlying database objects. Within each EUL, Discoverer can maintain multiple Business Areas representing one or more subject areas. The EUL supports analytic tasks by letting users create hierarchies, specify default formats and display properties, and create predefined option lists for queries, conditions and parameters.

The EUL manages runtime responsibilities as well. For example, when users initiate queries, the EUL will determine the availability of materialized views and redirect queries to them. The EUL also stores Discoverer privileges and captures metadata (for example, the tables and columns requested) about user-defined queries and usage statistics. Administrators can use these statistics to gain insights into the types of information requested as well as query performance, query volume, and usage patterns by time and date.

Discoverer's tight integration between report definition and report viewing reduces the cognitive burden on the user, allowing him or her to focus on their analysis rather than the technical set up issues. Discoverer's ability to display colorful tables and charts together (optionally from within the Oracle9i portal) allows analysts to work with more than 20 chart types to visualize query results. They can then drill down multiple levels through the charts to get to areas of interest.