What Is OBIEE

Today’s enterprise business scenarios are composed of multiple heterogeneous processes and systems that consists of transactional, ERP, decision support, analytical and custom home grown desktop applications based on spreadsheets and Microsoft Access etc. Data is distributed across the enterprise and integration among various systems to produce a single coherent view of business performance of the enterprise is difficult.


Oracle business intelligence is a system that provide the single enterprise view of the business performance producing actionable insights across and deep down from top to bottom of the enterprise. This is most popularly known as Oracle business intelligence enterprise edition OBIEE.
Oracle business intelligence provides the following features as listed below

Unified Enterprise View
Enables a single consistent and logical view of enterprise across multiple heterogeneous source such as ERP, data warehouse and operational systems.

Unified Semantic View
Models complex business information and modes form multiple sources to a common enterprise logical model.

End User Self Service
Business users can develop ad-hoc analytic reports based on their own needs and only be concerned about the business view of information

Real Time Information Access
Technologies like federated access, micro ETL, direct integration with transactional systems as well as replication provides this.

Performance Support By Oracle Appliance
Oracle Exalytics is OBIEE self-contained in an appliance. It is an hardware machine with preinstalled and configured OBIEE software.

Open Scalable Architecture
Multi tiered architecture enables it to scale vertically and horizontally in any tier.

Multiple Data Source Support
OBIEE supports multiple data sources ranging from ERP(EBS and Peoplesoft), Sieble CRM, data warehouses, OLAP cubes like Essbase and SSAS, spreadsheets and text files. Oracle data integrator tool is the common hub for data integration that provides the various adapters.

Built In And Customizable Analytic Capabilities
OBIEE Applications are a suite of products on top of the platform consisting of built in functionality that is extensible to Enterprise needs.

Foundation For Integrating Multiple Analytic Applications
Foundation for integrating multiple applications like Finance, procurement, HR, Transportation etc.

Publishing And Integration With Microsoft Excel

Integrated OLAP Sources Like Essbase
Data can be pulled and integrated with Essbase in a horizontal (drill through) or vertical (drill down capability)

Enterprise Mobile Capabilities
OBIEE has built in and customizable mobile platform capabilities in a distributed disconnected model.

Data Source Abstraction To Business
OBIEE provides a logical business data modal based on Common Information model that hides the data source from the business.

Highly Customizable And Modular
OBIEE is customizable in all tiers 1, e reports, repository. Middleware,ETL and data layer. Tiered architecture and functional subject areas provides modularity.

Interactive And Customizable Dashboards And Report

KPI, Alerts, Delivery And Automation

Common Data Integration
Oracle data integrator provides the common data integration platform across transactional, olAP, spreadsheet and other external data sources

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OBIEE Architecture

A typical OBIEE implementation consists of the multiple tiers as shown in the architecture diagram below. Information from data source layer is transformed and integrated along the way and presented in a manner that is consumable effectively the end business user.



OBIEE Tiered Architecture

1. Client Tier: This consists of the browser and the URL for accessing the OVIEE system from a laptop or a desktop or across the internet or mobile devices.
2. Web Tier: This is web catalog layer that stores the reports and dashboards developed by the BI business users.
3. Application Tier: Metadata layer called repository that develops SQL queries based on user requests
4. Data Warehouse: This layer is the data warehouse that stores the historical data in a schema suitable for BI analysis
5. ETL: Extract transform and load is the tool that transforms the transactional data into a format that is suitable for BI analysis.
6. Data Source: The data source are the various kinds of transactional and spreadsheet data sources.
OBIEE-training

The diagram above shows OBIEE application layer architecture. The Oracle application layer or popularly known as the Fusion Middleware layer is built upon a common domain based architecture that can support as set of common core functionality (like security, scalability etc) across various Oracle products. This is implemented with weblogic domain as shown is the diagram (Oracle BI domain).
The Oracle BI domain consists of two components


Weblogic Domain
The weblogic domain consists of the logical division of applications in the applications we server layer with a common architecture to administer them, called Admin servers and managed servers to perform the web applications work performed by the applications.

Admin Server
This consists of a set of admin server to manage the processes running in the domain.

Managed Server
These are product specific processes that run within weblogic. The core architecture is designed as such that multiple managed server can be started across multiple machines for load balancing as BI usage increases. The managed server consists of different application specific services like BI publisher (responsible for generating pixel perfect reports), BI Office (integration with MS office components like excel and ppt), Action service (responsible for navigation based on the action defined for a data cell in the reports).

Oracle BI System Components
The Oracle BI systems components are the server side components of the weblogic application layer domain that performs specific set of work. The system components are managed in an integrated fashion by a central process Oracle process manager (OPMN)

Oracle BI Server
Performs generation of SQL queries based on the Oracle BI repository metadata and the user requests. The SQL queries are then directed to the data source or the data warehouse to produce the desired results.

Oracle Presentation Server
This is responsible for rendering the report catalog with the data retrieved from the SQL queries to the dashboard.

Oracle BI Scheduler
Responsible for executing Oracle BI requests and in a scheduled automated manner and delivery of BI content such as generated reports to business users email. Responsible for monitoring the different business alerts set in the BI system.

Oracle BI Cluster Controller
Responsible for cluster control in high availability and failover environment in conjunction with Oracle cluster ware. Process failures detected in one node will results in automatic failover to the other nodes.