wiley oracle data warehousing and business intelligence solutions jan 2007

Acknowledgments xvPart I Oracle Business Intelligence Defined 1 Chapter 1 Oracle Business Intelligence 3 Business Intelligence and Transactional Applications 4 Business Activity Monitori

Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence

Solutions

Robert Stackowiak Joseph Rayman Rick Greenwald

Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence

Solutions

Oracle ® Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Solutions Published by

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Copyright © 2007 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana Published simultaneously in Canada

ISBN-13: 978-0-471-91921-6 ISBN-10: 0-471-91921-7 Manufactured in the United States of America

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in print may not be available in electronic books.

Robert Stackowiak is Vice President of Business Intelligence in Oracle’sTechnology Business Unit He has worked for over 20 years in businessintelligence, data warehousing, and IT-related roles at Oracle, IBM, HarrisCorporation, and the U.S Army Corps of Engineers His papers regardingbusiness intelligence and computer and software technology have appeared

in publications such as President & CEO Magazine, Database Trends and

Applications, and The Data Warehousing Institute’s publications He also

co-authored the books Oracle Essentials: Oracle Database 10g (currently in 3rd Edition, February 2004, O’Reilly), Oracle Application Server 10g Essentials (1st Edition, August 2004, O’Reilly), and Professional Oracle Programming

(1st Edition, June 2005, WROX)

Joseph Raymanleads the Oracle Consulting Business Intelligence Practice

in North America with over 20 years of business experience in a vast array

of industries, including financial services, manufacturing, retail, munications, healthcare, and federal government His technical and busi-ness leadership spans enterprise architecture design, enterprise datamodeling, VLDB system tuning, data warehouse design, data mining, andquality assurance activities for data warehouse practices Joe is a key con-tributor in defining and authoring Oracle Consulting’s Data WarehousingMethodology Prior to joining Oracle, Joe designed and deployed businessintelligence and statistical analysis solutions for a large food manufacturerand provided real-time trading and analysis solutions for a major interna-tional financial organization

telecom-About the Authors

v

Rick Greenwaldhas worked in the IT field for over 20 years for major dors, including Oracle, Gupta Technologies, Cognos, and Data General He

ven-has coauthored more than a dozen books, including Oracle Essentials: Oracle

Database 10g (currently in 3rd Edition, February 2004, O’Reilly), Oracle Application Server 10g Essentials (1st Edition, August 2004, O’Reilly), and Professional Oracle Programming (1st Edition, June 2005, WROX) Mr Green-

wald currently works for Ingres Corporation

Quality Control Technicians

Jessica KramerBrian H Walls

Acknowledgments xv

Part I Oracle Business Intelligence Defined 1

Chapter 1 Oracle Business Intelligence 3

Business Intelligence and Transactional Applications 4

Business Activity Monitoring 10

Enterprise Messaging Service 11

The Role of the Oracle Database 14

Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition 16 Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 18

Chapter 2 Oracle’s Transactional Business Intelligence 27

Transactional Business Intelligence 28

Oracle’s Daily Business Intelligence 30

The Oracle Customer Data Hub 49

Is Transactional Business Intelligence Enough? 52

Chapter 3 Introduction to Oracle Data Warehousing 53

Oracle Database Analysis and Schema Considerations 55 Managing an Oracle-based Data Warehouse 64

Oracle/Siebel Business Analytics Applications 73

Scaling Up Platforms Versus Scaling Out 76

Manageability Considerations 83

Information Needed for Warehouse Hardware Sizing 85 Benchmarking 86 Sizing Hardware for Business Intelligence Tools 89

Part II Custom-Built Data Warehousing Solutions 91

Features for Design — Enhancing Performance 98

Online Analytical Processing Design 116

Chapter 6 Business Intelligence Tools 127

Building and Deploying Oracle Portal and Portlets 132

Oracle BI Reporting Workbench (Actuate) 141

Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 143 Discoverer and Business Intelligence Standard Edition 153

Building Business Intelligence Applications 165

Oracle Database Data Loading Features 176Embedded ETL in the Oracle Database 177

Typical Steps when using OWB 182

OWB and Dimensional Models 189

Chapter 8 Managing the Oracle Data Warehouse 195

Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control 196Database Performance Monitoring 200

Chapter 9 Data Warehouse Performance Tuning and Monitoring 227

Understanding Performance Challenges 228

Successful Approaches to Performance Tuning 238Critical Tasks for Performance Tuning Lifecycle 239

Enterprise Manager Advisory Framework 258

Chapter 10 Scoping the Effort and an Approach for Success 277

Uncovering Key Business Initiatives 278

Chapter 11 Understanding Business Needs 307

How Bad Deployment Choices Impact the Business 308

Limited and Inflexible Reporting 310 Sources of Information Limited to Internal Data 311

Lack of Current High-Quality Data 312

Project Drivers and Business Types 314

Developing Scope and Gaining Business Support 326

Chapter 12 Justifying Projects and Claiming Success 329

Where to Start Justification 330

Common Budgeting Techniques 349

Modeling Total Cost of Ownership 357

Modeling Return on Investment 360

We begin by acknowledging the support of our families, especially ourwives who realize that authors sometimes get a bit cranky and difficult asdeadlines approach Although they probably hope there is not another bookcoming from any one of us soon, we realize such an undertaking would not

be possible without the support of Jodie Stackowiak, Donna Rayman, andLuAnn Greenwald

Special thanks to the folks at Wiley Publishing who worked their magic

to turn the documents and screen-captured images from our laptops intothe book you have in front of you We would especially like to thank TomDinse, our Senior Development Editor, and Bob Elliott, Wiley’s ExecutiveEditor who understood the need for such a book

Within Oracle, we have had the great fortune to work with many peopleskilled in this area From Oracle Development, we would like to acknowl-edge the following who have provided us with guidance over the yearsthat was especially relevant for this book: George Lumpkin, Robert Ash,Hermann Baer, Andrew Holdsworth, Paul Narth, Jean-Pierre Dijcks, PaulRodwick, Chris Leone, and Ray Roccaforte We would also like to acknowl-edge the contributions of business intelligence specialists in the TechnologyBusiness Unit, especially Louis Nagode, Gayl Czaplicki, Derrick Cameron,Jim Bienski, Alan Manewitz, Joan Maiorana, and the Enterprise Technol-ogy Center under Jim Olsen where we were able to illustrate some of thelarge-scale management capabilities

Acknowledgments

xv

Oracle also has a great many business intelligence specialists within sales,consulting, and other organizations around the world who remind us ofthe day-to-day challenges that their customers face when building thesesolutions Some of the key individuals who influenced the content in thisbook include David Pryor, Susan Cook, Steve Illingworth, Nick Whitehead,Jon Ainsworth, Kevin Lancaster, Craig Terry, Joe Thomas, Rob Reynolds,Rich Solari, Nuge Ajouz, Ken McMullen, Brian MacDonald, and PatrickViau There are many more, of course.

Lastly, much of the content in this book is based on the experience of theauthors Some of the descriptions of what to avoid are based on observa-tions we made of less successful techniques used by Oracle’s customers.But many of Oracle’s customers and partners provide innovation and tech-niques that take product features and turn them into useful solutions Wehave had the fortune of dealing with both types of customers, and thisbook is much stronger and realistic because of what these customers andthe Oracle partners have shared with us So, thank you to all of you whom

we have worked with over the years We especially hope you find thisbook to be of value as you build and develop your own solutions

We are now decades into deploying decision support systems, data houses, and business intelligence solutions Today, there are many booksthat describe data warehousing and design approaches There are manybooks that describe business intelligence There are many books thatdescribe the Oracle database So you may be asking, why did the authorsdecide to write this book?

ware-The fact is, the authors of this book still hear comments from many ofyou that business intelligence and data warehousing projects are problem-atic This seems to be true regardless of database technologies or businessintelligence tools selected and deployed While the wealth of Oracle skillsand resources that exist might make this less true where Oracle technology

is part of the solution, the number of implementations that face significantissues and the repetition of mistakes convinced the authors that too fewprojects are approached holistically Not many of the books that are avail-able as resources look at Oracle business intelligence and data warehous-ing in such a manner

This book attempts to give you a single reference that covers a diverserange of relevant topics in providing a holistic approach It covers the data-base and platform technology, of course But it also covers business intelli-gence tools, emerging business intelligence applications, architecture choices,schema selection, management and performance tuning, requirementsgathering, and justifying the project Tips are included throughout the bookbased on real experience and implementations

Introduction

xvii

Your tendency might be to jump to sections you know something about

or suspect as being a possible solution to a problem in order to furtherdevelop your knowledge of a specific topic Although you should findvalue in using this book that way, keep in mind that the reason many imple-mentations struggle is due to ignoring areas that should be understood andare outside the core competencies of those engaged in the project

To sum it up, the goal of this book is more than about gaining academicknowledge If this book attains its objective, you will gain knowledge thatyou can apply to your own project such that your deployed solution will beviewed as successful technically within Information Technology (IT), butalso successful because it delivers the business value that your businesscommunity recognizes

Who This Book Is For

This book should appeal to a wide audience Although those in IT will find

it particularly useful, more technically inclined business analysts and agers should also find value in topics such as justifying projects and evalu-ating deployment choices

man-Within IT, the day-to-day management and modification of such aninfrastructure often falls on database administrators, programmers, andsystems managers Certainly, we cover topics of interest to this group.Unfortunately, the value of architects and project managers in deployingand updating such solutions is often overlooked There is plenty in thisbook that should also appeal to that audience

How This Book Is Organized

This book is divided into three parts:

Oracle Business Intelligence DefinedCustom Built Data Warehousing SolutionsBest Practices

Part I: Oracle Business Intelligence Defined

Part I provides a broad background as to possible Oracle-based solutionsand how you might deploy them The database and business intelligencetools are introduced here, but other related topics are covered as well in thefollowing four chapters

Chapter 1: Oracle Business Intelligence

A broad introduction of Oracle business intelligence is provided Topicsintroduced include Oracle’s transactional business intelligence, integrationcomponents, and components in custom-built data warehouses and busi-ness intelligence solutions

Chapter 2: Oracle’s Transactional Business Intelligence

Sometimes called operational business intelligence, this chapter describesOracle’s Daily Business Intelligence modules, Balanced Scorecard solution,and Data Hubs (used in master data management) You are provided withguidance as to where such solutions might be particularly useful and why

a data warehouse might also be deployed to augment such a solution

Chapter 3: Introduction to Oracle Data Warehousing

The introduction of this topic covers the wide array of features in the cle database that are relevant in data warehousing More detailed explana-tions are provided in Part II of this book In addition, the chapter covers thedata models that Oracle provides for its applications as pre-built datawarehousing solutions

Ora-Chapter 4: Choosing a Platform

The basics of choosing a hardware platform are covered including scaling

up versus scaling out and how to size your choice Specifics addressedunder these broad topics include high availability considerations, manage-ability considerations, and approaches to benchmarking

Part II: Custom-Built Data Warehousing Solutions

Most business intelligence solutions today are custom built Part IIdescribes design approaches and deploying and managing business intel-ligence tools and an Oracle data warehousing database These areexplained in the following five chapters

Chapter 5: Designing for Usability

Covering approaches to design, topics in this chapter include how to leverageOracle features and an illustration of how these features can be used to pro-vide solutions to needs driven by a business scenario Schema approachesare described including third normal form, star schema, hybrids, andOnline Analytical Processing (OLAP)

Chapter 6: Business Intelligence Tools

This chapter introduces using and deploying Oracle’s wide array of ness intelligence tools, including portals, reporting, and ad hoc query andanalysis tools The Oracle Business Intelligence Suites (Standard Editionand Enterprise Edition) are covered In addition, the Oracle database sup-port provided by business intelligence tools available from other vendors

busi-is described

Chapter 7: Data Loading

Embedded extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) features provided

by the Oracle database are described in this chapter Oracle WarehouseBuilder’s role in ETL, target data warehouse design, data quality analyses,and metadata management is also described

Chapter 8: Managing the Oracle Data Warehouse

Oracle Enterprise Manager provides a useful interface often used in aging Oracle data warehouses as described in this chapter The Grid Controlinterface for managing clusters is illustrated, as are interfaces for basic per-formance monitoring, administration, and maintenance

man-Chapter 9: Data Warehouse Performance Tuning and Monitoring

Typical performance challenges are described and proven approaches tosolving such challenges are presented We then illustrate using suchapproaches to tune the data warehouse first described in the business sce-nario presented in Chapter 5

Part III: Best Practices

Understanding the technology is great, but is no guarantee of success PartIII will help you identify potential risk and best approaches for mitigatingrisk as you develop and deploy your solution These best practices aredescribed in the following three chapters:

Chapter 10: Scoping the Effort and an Approach for Success

This chapter describes how to uncover initiatives by your business munity, securing business sponsorship, endorsing a methodology, projectstaffing, and managing risk

com-Chapter 11: Understanding Business Needs

Business needs for better business intelligence might be driven by a poorlydesigned solution or by a new business requirement Examples of less opti-mal solutions and how they can impact the business are first described inthis chapter Typical project drivers driven by business requirements are thenpresented followed by suggestions on how to build support for a project

Chapter 12: Justifying Projects and Claiming Success

Getting the go-ahead to build a solution often requires financial tion This chapter identifies the potential costs you should consider andwhere business benefits might come from Financial benefits are computedfor a variety of scenarios and computing return on investment (ROI) isdescribed

justifica-Illustrations in the Text

Oracle product illustrations in the text are captured from recent Oraclesoftware versions You should be able to leverage similar capabilitiesregardless of your Oracle software version provided you have Oracle Data-base 10g, Oracle Business Intelligence 10g, or newer releases of these prod-ucts We frequently indicate when key features were introduced in theseproducts so that if you have older releases deployed, you can understandlimitations you might face

From Here

To become an expert on this topic usually requires years of practice andlearning, implementations for a variety of companies and organizations,and the uncommon ability to feel equally at home discussing needs anddetails among both IT and business co-workers For those that grow insuch expertise, there is great opportunity and potential reward

This book is intended to help lay that foundation Of course, your cess will depend not only on what you read in the following chapters, butalso on how you put what you learn here into practice in the solutions youwork on As you now start reading this book, it is our hope that it will helpyou avoid many common pitfalls and that you will gain a better perspec-tive on how to attain professional success in building and deploying suchprojects

suc-PA R T

I

Oracle Business Intelligence Defined

In This PartChapter 1: Oracle Business IntelligenceChapter 2: Oracle’s Transactional Business IntelligenceChapter 3: Introduction to Oracle Data WarehousingChapter 4: Choosing a Platform

Business intelligence can be defined as having the right access to the rightdata or information needed to make the right business decisions at theright time The data might be raw or might have been analyzed in someway Having access to such information enables management of the busi-ness by fact instead of by primarily relying on intuition

This is a broad definition of business intelligence and is not limited todata warehousing alone Although a data warehouse is often used to pro-vide such a solution and is the primary focus of most of this book, we’llbroaden the discussion to also include business intelligence gained fromon-line transaction processing solutions Business analysts and users ofbusiness intelligence don’t really care about — or want to understandwhere their information comes from They simply want access to suchsources So the solution you choose to deploy will depend on the kind ofinformation that is needed

This chapter provides a broad discussion of Oracle’s business gence offerings and should help you better understand all of the solutiontypes available for deployment We conclude this chapter by discussingsome of the emerging business needs that will lead to a further blending ofdata warehousing and transactional systems In subsequent chapters inthis section of the book, we provide more details as to how and why you’d

intelli-Oracle Business Intelligence

C H A P T E R

1

deploy transactional business intelligence and data warehousing tions We also discuss some of the platform strategies for deployment.After the introductory first section of this book, we describe in muchgreater detail the area of business intelligence that you are probably mostinterested in: custom-built data warehousing solutions using Oracle databases We provide examples of how you can design, use, and managevarious capabilities of the Oracle database and Oracle business intelligencetools In the final section of this book, we discuss best practices and strate-gies for deployment of such solutions.

solu-Although the primary audience of the book is information technology(IT) professionals, we begin this book with the following warning: build-ing a business intelligence solution as an IT project without sponsorship of

or buy-in by the lines of business is likely to end in very limited success orcareer-limiting failure For many of you, the non-technical portions of thisbook in the best practices section might initially be of the least interest,because your interest is centered in IT and implementing technology plat-form solutions However, applying techniques described in that sectioncould determine whether your project is viewed as successful

Business Intelligence and Transactional Applications

Transactional applications generally provide business intelligence to ness users through reports that reveal current data in transactional tables.Oracle’s E-Business Suite of applications, PeopleSoft applications, JDEdwards applications, and Siebel Customer Relationship Managementapplications all provide this level of business intelligence Reporting isselected and deployed based on key business requirements (KBRs) andmost commonly displayed as key performance indicators (KPIs) in a dash-board using portal technology

busi-Most companies also deploy business intelligence solutions that rely on acomplementary data warehousing strategy when reporting and analysisbecomes more complex and summary level information is appropriate.Oracle’s PeopleSoft and JD Edwards’ EnterpriseOne applications are oftensurrounded by the PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management (EPM)data warehouse to enable such reporting through analytical applications.Oracle’s Siebel Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applicationsare similarly often surrounded by Business Analytics Applications builtupon a relationship management warehouse model Other application ven-dors (such as SAP with their Business Warehouse) have such data ware-house models that often are deployed on Oracle databases

The Oracle E-Business Suite leverages more of a blended approach todelivering business intelligence applications as many of these applicationsrely on data in summary levels of transactional tables The Enterprise Plan-ning and Budgeting application, a more complex analytical application,leverages Oracle OLAP technology in a separate multi-dimensional cube.

At the time of publication of this book, Oracle has described manyaspects of Project Fusion, Oracle’s future single set of transactional appli-cations that provide a migration path for current deployments of the E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel CRM applications.The business intelligence solutions provided for this next generation ofapplications will continue to provide a blending of transactional businessintelligence and incorporate data warehousing concepts

Among Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft EPM offerings, a ber of common business intelligence applications are provided including abalanced scorecard, activity-based management, and enterprise planningand budgeting applications In addition, the Oracle E-Business Suite hasDaily Business Intelligence We’ll briefly describe what these applications

num-do in this chapter, and describe them in more detail in Chapter 2

Where multiple transaction processing vendors’ data models are present,

a variety of integration approaches are also possible We include a sion of some of those in this chapter

discus-Daily Business Intelligence

To speed deployment of management reporting showing real-time transaction-level data, the Oracle E-Business Suite features Daily BusinessIntelligence Many key management roles are pre-defined, including roles

of Chief Executive Officer, vice president of operations, vice president ofprocurement, vice president of service contracts, project executive, market-ing manager, sales manager, manager of e-mail, profit center manager, andcost center manager

A performance management framework is provided to define KPIs (ormeasures) and dimensions, set targets, and subscribe to alerts Out-of-the-box, over 250 key measures are predefined, including revenue, expenses,costs of revenue, contribution margin, gross margin, percentage margin,total headcount and average salary per employee, lead activity, lead con-version, purchase order purchases, contract leakage, inventory turns, andproject revenue Common dimensions are supported across the E-BusinessSuite modules, including time, geography, customer, supplier, item, ware-house, currency, manager, organization, project organization, sales group,and operating group

Reports are typically at the day level with period-to-date calculationsavailable for any day Data is aggregated at multiple levels of the timedimension, including day, week, month, quarter, and year Report pages areprovided out-of-the-box for profit and loss, expense management, compli-ance management, HR management, operations management, order man-agement, fulfillment management, project profitability management,product lifecycle management, profit operations management, quote man-agement, marketing management, leads management, sales management,sales comparative performance, opportunity management, procure-ment management, procure-to-pay management, and service contractsmanagement.

Figure 1-1 shows a dashboard view provided by Daily Business gence for sales management of forecasts with KPIs available for salesgroup and direct reports forecasts, pipeline and weighted pipeline, andwon to period

Intelli-Balanced Scorecard

Executives have long sought a strategic management tool based on surements of financial status, customer feedback and other outcomes, andinternal process flows that illustrate the state of the business and exposeareas where improvement might be desirable In 1992, Drs David Nortonand Robert Kaplan developed such a tool and named it the Balanced Scorecard This tool is often used at companies focused on Total QualityManagement (TQM), where the goals are measurement-based manage-ment and feedback, employee empowerment, continuous improvement,and customer-defined quality

mea-Figure 1-1: A sales manager’s view within Daily Business Intelligence

A Balanced Scorecard incorporates a feedback loop around businessprocess outputs and the outcome of the business strategies This double-loop feedback provides a comparison to financials that results in a morebalanced approach to business management Typical metrics viewed showpresent status of an organization, provide diagnostic feedback and trends

in performance over time, indicate which metrics are critical, and provideinput for forecasting

Oracle’s E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft brands offer Balanced card products that will be merged into a single product in Oracle’s nextgeneration Fusion applications KPIs are viewed through a desktop inter-face enabling achievement of business goals to be monitored and strategicactions to be taken and recorded The E-Business Suite Balanced Scorecardcan leverage KPIs present in Daily Business Intelligence Scorecards andassociated reports are created with design tools present in the products

Score-Figure 1-2 shows a typical balanced scorecard strategy map showing thestatus of various processes

Figure 1-2: Typical Balanced Scorecard strategy map

Enterprise Planning and Budgeting

Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and their staffs plan budgets, forecastfinancial achievements, and monitor and analyze the results Oracle’s E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft brands each offer Enterprise Planning andBudgeting (EPB) tools (see Figure 1-3) that will be merged into a singleoffering when Oracle releases the next generation Fusion applications.Since EPB solutions provide updates to the transactions systems, eachbranded version of EPB today features seamless integration with corre-sponding general ledger products The E-Business Suite tool leveragesOracle’s database OLAP Option for analysis and leverages the EnterprisePerformance Foundation (EPF) that includes predefined schema, openinterface tables, and loader engines The PeopleSoft version leverages theEPM schema and loading capabilities

By deploying an EPB solution, what-if budgeting analyses can be pared EPB can enable consistent and repeatable methodologies to be putinto place for planning budgets and agreeing upon forecasts Models can

com-be shared The analyses results can com-be viewed through a portal or sharedthrough e-mail, worksheets, briefing books, or spreadsheets

EPB reports and budgets can include multiple currencies Historicresults can use the actual exchange rates while planned projects can incor-porate budgeted exchange rates

Figure 1-3: Oracle E-Business Suite Enterprise Planning and Budgeting

Activity-Based Management

Although transactional applications typically show costs of components,gaining an understanding of total costs of product, services, or customerscan require a more targeted application Activity-Based Management(ABM) solutions provide a means to map these individual costs includingactivities, materials, resources, and products or services As a result, itbecomes possible to understand the profitability of customers, products,channels, and markets Oracle’s E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft brandseach offer ABM tools These will be merged into a single offering in Ora-cle’s next generation Fusion applications Today, each is integrated withthe brand’s corresponding general ledger offering

Using an ABM solution, activity costs can be analyzed for setting priate charge-back rates, establishing performance benchmarks, and targetcosting of new product development Activities, materials, and other costscan be mixed and matched in preparation for bids or based on sales vol-ume projections Unused capacity costs can be tracked

appro-Oracle Integration Components Enabling Business Intelligence

A classic approach to providing a single version of the truth, where ple transactional applications exist, is to build a data warehouse This iscommon practice where the goal is to store and analyze years of transac-tional history and where data quality in source systems is a known issue.However, alternative integration strategies are sometimes used where onlyrecent transactions are needed for business intelligence Solutions based onOracle technology components are enabled through what is called OracleFusion Middleware, also known as the Oracle Application Server

multi-A variety of solutions exist Data hubs can be leveraged to create a master data model where the goal is a common representation of key per-formance indicators around customers, financials, and other areas Busi-ness activity monitoring can provide an alert-based solution for viewingtransactional changes from a variety of sources BPEL can be used to definebusiness processes among different systems An Enterprise Messaging Service can be deployed to link data feeds among widely differing sources Integration strategy is a lengthy topic and covering it in detail is not agoal for this book However, we do provide an introduction to some of thekey concepts here

Data Hubs

Data hubs are centralized repositories used to reconcile data from multiplesource systems They are often used where companies have deployed mul-tiple vendors’ transactional solutions with different data definitions andwhere it is desired to have a single location where an official definition lives.Reconciled data can be enriched with other data, viewed, and created orupdated In some situations, data might be sent back in a correct form tosource systems (although this can introduce additional workload on thosesystems, so it is less common in practice) Although hubs are sometimesconfused with operational data stores (an ODS is shown in Figure 1-5 later

in this chapter), a hub is different in that it usually points to data residing inthe originating systems without physically moving the data into the hub.Oracle’s first hubs were based on the E-Business Suite schema andinclude the Customer Hub, Financial Consolidation Hub, Product Infor-mation Management Data Hub, Citizen Data Hub, and Financial ServicesAccounting Data Hub Because of this, Oracle’s hubs are well integratedwith Daily Business Intelligence and the Balanced Scorecard products.Oracle also offers a Customer Master Data integration hub created bySiebel prior to the acquisition by Oracle

Business Activity Monitoring

Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) enables the monitoring in real-timethrough dashboards of business services and processes, including correla-tion of KPIs to business processes The goal is to enable business executives

to take corrective action in a much more timely fashion

Unlike traditional business intelligence tools that rely on periodic polling

to update information, BAM uses an alerting infrastructure to update thedashboard when changes occur Hence, BAM is a true monitor of changesand can be paired with traditional business intelligence tools where furtheranalyses may be necessary BAM can also be used as an infrastructure forcustom dashboard monitoring across multiple source systems Businessmanagers can define and modify their own dashboard pages

Oracle also builds and provides BAM-based applications such as the PeopleSoft Customer Relationship Management (CRM) dashboards Forexample, the Enterprise Sales Dashboard provides a real-time view into rev-enue attainment, pipeline status, and sales-team performance The EnterpriseOrder Capture Dashboard displays the status of orders, revenue quotas, andorder throughput Enterprise dashboards for Service, Helpdesk, and HumanResources Helpdesk monitor case and e-mail throughput, service-leveladherence, and agent and group case workload levels

BPEL Process Manager

As companies move toward a service-oriented architecture (SOA) fordeployment of business processes, assembling these reusable processestogether into business process flows is desirable The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) is an XML-based languagethat enables the building of such process flows The Oracle BPEL ProcessManager is Oracle’s tool providing the necessary infrastructure to design,build, and monitor the flows It has support for asynchronous interactions,flow control, and compensating business transactions

When using Oracle BPEL, you first synchronously define needed vices to be invoked, then define exception handling procedures, buildassignments of relevant XML information that should be leveraged in thedecision making process, define triggers for callback services, and defineconditional branches Oracle BPEL includes an automated testing inter-face, including audit trails and debugger Figure 1-4 shows the BPELConsole interface

ser-After testing, you can deploy to a J2EE application server (most monly Oracle Fusion Middleware Application Server) In production, thebusiness asynchronous flow is initiated, then asynchronous callbacks arereceived, and the process flow subsequently branches to and presents theappropriate business outcome

com-Enterprise Messaging Service

In SOA and other deployments where trickle feeds of data are needed inorder to integrate distributed applications, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)solutions are becoming common The ESB provides an underlying messag-ing infrastructure

Figure 1-4: The BPEL Console

Oracle provides an ESB solution through the Oracle Enterprise ing Service (OEMS) OEMS is built upon the standards-based Java MessageService (JMS) and the J2EE Connector Architecture (J2CA) It can be integrated with non-Oracle messaging infrastructures such as IBM WebSphereMQ (MQSeries), Tibco Enterprise JMS, and SonicMQ Variousservice levels are possible for persistence and recovery, including in-memory, file system, and database-backed message persistence

Messag-Custom Data Warehouse Solutions

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, decision support databases began to bedeployed separately from transactional databases and were insteaddeployed into what became known as data warehouses This model of sep-arating the workloads was driven by the need to report on, query, and ana-lyze increasingly large amounts of data with varying levels of complexity

An important goal was not to impact the transactional systems while doingthis There was much debate during the 1990s as to whether a single enter-prise data warehouse with a third normal data model was appropriate asthe separate database, or whether the right solution was departmental datamarts deployed with star schema As the decade progressed, the tradeoffsassociated with each approach became understood

THIRD NORMAL FORM AND STAR SCHEMA

In a normal form database, all attributes are atomic and contain unique values (not sets) and cannot have nested relationships A database is considered to be

a second normal form if all relationships of nonprimary attributes are based on the primary keys In a third normal form, nonprimary attributes are linked using keys to foreign keys There is no discernable pattern in this linkage Third normal form schema are common in transaction processing databases and enterprise data warehouses

By comparison, a star schema appears to be in the shape of a star in a schema diagram It consists of a relatively large transaction or fact table surrounded by and linked to dimension or look-up tables through foreign keys The dimensions contain hierarchies representing the roll-up of summary levels One of the dimensions is almost always time The star schema is ideal for posing queries similar to: “How many transactions occurred in a specific location over a specific period of time?” As a result, such schema are considered ideal where business analysts access a database and want to perform ad hoc queries or their own analysis.

Enterprise data warehouses were initially proposed as a single tory of all historic data for a company In many companies, this approachbecame bogged down in the politics of creating a single data model andgaining corporate-wide approval Inevitable delays resulted and little or

reposi-no business value was delivered in a timely fashion Where only enterprisedata warehouses were created during this time, the schema design wastypically third normal form enabling flexible update strategies but not pro-viding the ease of use many business analysts expected

The alternative exercised in many companies was the building of datamarts as departmental initiatives These marts could be more quickly de-ployed when driven by local business needs, but they were often designedand deployed without any inter-departmental coordination Questions thatcrossed two departments could be asked of separated data marts and twodifferent answers would often be obtained Data marts were typicallydeployed with star schema enabling business users to more easily submit

ad hoc queries and perform analyses

A solution that emerged in the late 1990s to address the downside ofboth of these deployment models was the incremental building of an enter-prise data warehouse at the same time dependent data marts were builtusing consistent data definitions The marts were often fed from the enter-prise data warehouse that became the single source of truth Figure 1-5 is arepresentation of this commonly deployed business intelligence topologywhere an operational data store is also present as a gathering point oftransactional data

Figure 1-5: Topology that includes an enterprise data warehouse and marts

Enterprise Data Warehouse

External Data Source

Business Analyst Clients

Business Analyst Portal

On-line Transaction Processing System

Data Marts

Operational Data Store

Today, many companies are leveraging the advanced data warehousingfeatures in databases such as Oracle to consolidate the data mart schemainto the same database as the enterprise data warehouse The resultinghybrid schema is the third normal form for the detailed data and starschema or OLAP cubes for the summary-level data.

The Oracle database is capable of supporting such hybrids and featuresembedded analytics and star optimization for business analysis combinedwith advanced management capabilities enabling ongoing maintenance ofvery large implementations Oracle’s business intelligence tools can lever-age many of the database analysis features The focus of much of this bookwill be on how to deploy the database for data warehousing and how toappropriately set up and use the business intelligence tools For example,Chapter 5 describes tradeoffs of the various design approaches we intro-duced here

The Role of the Oracle Database

The Oracle database is the heart of a data warehousing and business ligence solution Oracle’s long history as a relational database vendor datesback to the late 1970s with an initial focus on online transaction processingworkloads As deployment of data warehouses for decision support andbusiness intelligence became popular, Oracle began adding features toaddress such workloads, most notably beginning with Oracle7 in 1991.Today, the Oracle database contains a rich set of features designed fortoday’s most demanding business intelligence environments

intel-For example, Oracle added performance features such as extensive lelism, static bitmap indexes, advanced star join techniques, materializedviews and embedded analytic functions, multi-dimensional cubes (OLAP),and data mining As the databases have grown in size and complexity, Ora-cle developed more extensive management and self-management capabili-ties including Enterprise Manager’s specific features for data warehousingmanagement, automatic degree of parallelism, memory allocation at querytime, a database resource manager, table compression, the Automatic Data-base Diagnostics Monitor (ADDM), and the Automatic Storage Manager(ASM) Of course, as data warehouses obtain their data from other sources,Oracle added and optimized many data movement capabilities within thedatabase including SQL*Loader for direct path loading, extraction, trans-formation, and loading (ETL) extensions to SQL, transportable tablespaces,and Streams for advanced queuing and replication

paral-These features are all necessary; although a data warehouse can startsmall and relatively simple, providing the right data to make fundamental

business decisions often requires more historical data over time in finergranularity and detail Analysis needs might require near real-time access

to the data As business analysts evolve in their understanding of the data,simple reporting is often not enough and many begin to augment theirdecision making with ad hoc queries and sophisticated analyses

Since business needs continue to evolve in most companies, most datawarehouses are never considered to be complete Rather, a data warehouse

is deployed in an evolutionary way in order to match business ments when business needs change

require-We’ll spend much of the focus of this book not only explaining what thepreviously mentioned features do, but also how they can be applied andthe best practices that should be considered As we are also covering howthe business intelligence tools fit in an overall deployment strategy, we’llnow provide a brief introduction to those tools here

Oracle Warehouse Builder

Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) is an infrastructure builders’ tool mostoften used during the design and deployment of data warehouses The datawarehouse design might include schema in third normal form, star schema,OLAP cubes, or as a hybrid schema of multiple types OWB provides aninterface to also define the source to target data extraction, transformationand load (ETL) mappings, generate the ETL script, coordinate workflows,and perform metadata management Figure 1-6 shows the Design Center inOWB where projects and connections are defined and components shared OWB-generated scripts can pull data from other Oracle databases, otherrelational sources accessible via ODBC or Oracle Transparent Gateways,and from flat files with fixed width or delimited columns Integrators areavailable to enable ease in building extractions from source tables in theOracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, or SAP applications The generatedscripts can be scheduled using Oracle Enterprise Manager or other popu-lar schedulers and can leverage Oracle Workflow

A library of standard data transformations is provided and customlibraries can be built and shared Name and address cleansing can be incor-porated in the ETL scripts using libraries available from third-party ven-dors for various geographies around the world Oracle Warehouse Builderalso added data profiling capabilities as part of a Data Quality Option firstreleased in 2006 Formerly packaged in the Internet Developer Suite, theOWB base version is now included with the database Other options inaddition to the Data Quality Option include Enterprise ETL and the previ-ously mentioned Applications Connectors

Figure 1-6: Oracle Warehouse Builder Design Center

All development done with OWB, including importing of source tions, mapping of sources to targets, building of custom transformations,and added descriptions, are stored in the OWB repository that the OWBclient is linked to This metadata is stored consistent with a version of theCommon Warehouse Metamodel (CWM) definition, a specification fromthe Object Management Group Data lineage and impact analysis diagramscan be viewed through a browser Metadata bridges are provided for manytools, including Oracle tools such as Discoverer In addition, third-partybridges from the OWB version of CWM to other repository formats areavailable

defini-Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition

The two BI tools that form the basis of Oracle Business Intelligence dard Edition are Oracle Discoverer and Reports We begin this discussionwith the Oracle business intelligence tool that historically was the mostcommonly used by business analysts, Discoverer

Discoverer was first introduced as an ad-hoc query tool, but added bilities enabling more extensive analysis (through support of Oracle’sOLAP Option) and user-based reporting (including creation of Adobe PDFformat and e-mail distribution of reports) Although Discoverer is mostoften used with data warehouses, it can access any database and is bun-dled with some versions of Oracle applications Discoverer is based onconcepts that most business users are familiar with: workbooks that definebroad business areas and worksheets for specific areas such as you mightfind in a spreadsheet

capa-Discoverer has web-based clients named capa-Discoverer Plus and capa-DiscovererViewer (Figure 1-7 shows creating a new calculation leveraging analyticfunctions from within Discoverer Viewer.) An older client-server versionnamed Discoverer Desktop was still available when this book was published

As most deployments are web-based today, Oracle’s focus in providing newfunctionality is limited to the web-based clients These clients are also part ofthe Oracle Application Server Enterprise Edition in addition to being pack-aged with Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition

Figure 1-7: Discoverer Viewer showing new calculation creation