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Oracle® Business Intelligence Concepts Guide 10g Release 2 (10.1.2.1) B16378-01 |
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# Preface

This guide introduces readers to Oracle Business Intelligence. It provides an overview of what you can do with Oracle Business Intelligence, and it explains concepts that you need to understand as you plan to implement a business intelligence solution.

## Audience

Oracle Business Intelligence Concepts Guide is intended for information consumers, report creators, analysts, data providers, DBAs, and application developers who perform the following tasks:

- Use data analysis to help make business decisions

- Develop custom reports for their own use and for other users

- Prepare data for analysis

- Administer Oracle Database for a business intelligence system

- Develop custom solutions for analyzing data stored in an Oracle database

To use this document, you need no prior experience with business intelligence software.

## Documentation Accessibility

Our goal is to make Oracle products, services, and supporting documentation accessible, with good usability, to the disabled community. To that end, our documentation includes features that make information available to users of assistive technology. This documentation is available in HTML format, and contains markup to facilitate access by the disabled community. Accessibility standards will continue to evolve over time, and Oracle is actively engaged with other market-leading technology vendors to address technical obstacles so that our documentation can be accessible to all of our customers. For more information, visit the Oracle Accessibility Program Web site at

`http://www.oracle.com/accessibility/`

Accessibility of Code Examples in Documentation

Screen readers may not always correctly read the code examples in this document. The conventions for writing code require that closing braces should appear on an otherwise empty line; however, some screen readers may not always read a line of text that consists solely of a bracket or brace.

Accessibility of Links to External Web Sites in Documentation

This documentation may contain links to Web sites of other companies or organizations that Oracle does not own or control. Oracle neither evaluates nor makes any representations regarding the accessibility of these Web sites.

TTY Access to Oracle Support Services

Oracle provides dedicated Text Telephone (TTY) access to Oracle Support Services within the United States of America 24 hours a day, seven days a week. For TTY support, call 800.446.2398.

## Structure

This guide is structured as follows:

Chapter 1, "The Oracle Business Intelligence Solution"

This chapter provides a general introduction to business intelligence and shows you how Oracle Business Intelligence helps you answer business questions. It is written for business users and IT professionals.

Chapter 2, "Technical Fundamentals for Implementation"

This chapter describes fundamental concepts for building a business intelligence solution with Oracle Business Intelligence. It focuses on data structures and metadata for reporting and describes options for reporting tools and delivery mechanisms. This chapter is written primarily for IT professionals.

Chapter 3, "Example Implementations"

This chapter provides sample scenarios for two different Oracle Business Intelligence solutions. It is written primarily for IT professionals.

Appendix A, "Oracle Business Intelligence Packaging"

This appendix lists the components of different Oracle Business Intelligence packages.

## Related Documents

For more information, see these Oracle resources:

- Oracle Application Server Installation Guide

- Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer Plus User's Guide

- Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer Publishing Workbooks in Oracle Application Server Portal

- Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer Viewer User's Guide

- Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer Administration Guide

- Oracle Reports Building Reports

- Oracle Application Server Reports Services Publishing Reports to the Web

- Oracle Warehouse Builder User's Guide

- Oracle Data Warehousing Guide

- Oracle OLAP Application Developer's Guide

- Oracle Data Mining Concepts

- Oracle Data Mining Application Developer's Guide

- Oracle Data Mining Administrator's Guide

- Oracle Business Intelligence Beans Help (in Oracle JDeveloper)

- Oracle Business Intelligence Spreadsheet Add-In Help (in Microsoft Excel)

The Oracle Technology Network (OTN) provides services and resources that developers, DBAs, and architects need to build, test, and deploy applications using Oracle products and industry-standard technologies. It provides free access to documentation, release notes, white papers, product announcements, and other vital information. The OTN Web site is at

`http://www.oracle.com/technology/index.html`

The OTN Web site for Business Intelligence is at

`http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/index.html`

## Oracle By Example Series

The Oracle By Example (OBE) series provides hands-on, step-by-step instructions on how to implement various technology solutions to business problems. OBE contains numerous lessons on Business Intelligence from its Web site at:

`http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/start/bi.html`

Following is a list of some of these lessons.

OracleBI Discoverer

The OracleBI Discoverer area includes these and other lessons:

- Creating Business Intelligence Reports Using OracleBI Discoverer Plus OLAP

- Analyzing Sales History Information using OracleBI Discoverer Plus Relational

- Viewing Sales History Information Using OracleBI Discoverer Viewer

- Creating a Business Intelligence Dashboard Using OracleBI Discoverer Portlets

OracleBI Spreadsheet Add-In

The OracleBI Spreadsheet Add-In are includes this lesson:

- Using the OracleBI Spreadsheet Add-In

OracleBI Beans

The OracleBI Beans area include these lessons:

- Develop Business Intelligence Applications Using OracleBI Beans

- Develop Business Intelligence Objects Using OracleBI Beans

Oracle Reports

The Oracle Reports area includes these and other lessons:

- Creating a Report Using the Report Wizard

- Creating a Graph Using the Graph Wizard

- Applying Conditional Formatting in a Paper Report

- Applying Conditional Formatting in the JSP Web Source

Oracle Warehouse Builder

The Oracle Warehouse Builder area these and other lessons:

- Importing Source Metadata

- Defining a Target Module

- Dimensional Design Using Oracle Warehouse Builder

- Designing ETL Data Flow Mapping

- Designing Process Flows

Oracle Database: Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing

The Oracle Business Intelligence platform area includes these and other lessons:

- ETL Infrastructure Inside Oracle Database 10g

- Populating Your OLAP Analytic Workspace Using Analytic Workspace Manager

- Solving Business Problems with Oracle Data Mining

- Using Basic Database Functionality for Data Warehousing

## Conventions

The following text conventions are used in this document:

Convention | Meaning
--- | ---
boldface | Boldface type indicates graphical user interface elements associated with an action, or terms defined in text or the glossary.
italic | Italic type indicates book titles, emphasis, or placeholder variables for which you supply particular values.
`monospace` | Monospace type indicates commands within a paragraph, URLs, code in examples, text that appears on the screen, or text that you enter.