• Oracle9 i DS Warehouse Builder - enables the design, deployment and management of enterprise data warehouses; provides the framework for integrating the components of Oracle's Business Intelligence solution
• Oracle9 i AS Discoverer - equips end users with their own ad-hoc query and analysis capabilities
• Oracle9 i DS Reports - enterprise publishing of data from any data source, in any format, to any destination throughout the enterprise and beyond
• Oracle9 i AS Portal - is a role-based, single point of access to BI information
• Oracle9 i AS Clickstream Intelligence - is integrated with Warehouse Builder and Discoverer to provide Web site analysis
• Oracle9 i AS Personalization - uses Oracle9i Data Mining techniques to provide real time recommendations to visitors of a Web site
• Oracle9 i Data Mining - is integrated with Oracle9i Database to make classifications, predictions, and associations
• Oracle9 i DS Business Intelligence Beans - is integrated with JDeveloper, BI Beans provides a set of standards-based JavaBeansT that enables developers to build business intelligence applications

"The business intelligence imperative insists we elevate BI to a strategic initiative now, or risk disaster!" states Howard Dresner (AV-13-8785 7/17/01). In the past, building a BI system for the enterprise would require IT professionals to purchase, install and deploy best of breed tools piecemeal. Unfortunately, such piecemeal solutions result in proliferating complexity and escalating maintenance costs. Furthermore, when multiple disparate vendors upgrade their respective products they rarely account for any implications on neighboring BI products. Oracle Corporation is the only vendor that can provide a complete and integrated BI solution.

Data Consolidation with Oracle 9 i DS Warehouse Builder
Consolidating data is becoming increasingly complex as businesses face mergers and acquisitions, reorganizations, and globalization. The data tends to become spread throughout the entire organization in multiple data sources, making it increasingly difficult to gather business intelligence. The Oracle9 i DS Warehouse Builder component is designed to consolidate disparate data sources, perform any required data transformations, manage the warehouse lifecycle, and integrate with the analysis tools.

Step 1: Map transactional sources to a target data warehouse : The user can simply drag and drop objects from the source modules to use as building blocks in designing a target warehouse. After the objects of interest are selected, OWB provides a graphical mapping environment where users can model all aspects of a mapping in the form of a dataflow diagram. These mappings include participating source and target tables and all other operations that apply to the extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) process.

Step 2: Generate the code to extract, transform and load data : Once the mapping models are completed, OWB can generate the SQL and PL/SQL code to instantiate and populate the data warehouse. This saves time and reduces the level of expertise required to program SQL code. Furthermore, OWB is open to allow users to inspect the code at any step in the ETL operation. OWB can perform the ETL operation in one complete step, making warehouse deployment fast and easy.

Step 3: Generate the business area : Now that the data is consolidated and loaded into a target warehouse, the multidimensional design is easily shared with the ad-hoc query and analysis tool, Oracle9 i AS Discoverer. All repository and runtime metadata is exposed via public views. This means that Oracle9 i AS Discoverer can "understand" the dimensions and hierarchies as well as all table names and column headers. As a result, valuable programming time is saved because the user is not required to recreate the metadata.

Step 4: Warehouse lifecycle management : Once the warehouse is deployed, managing changes to the warehouse is essential. Changes, such as tables, columns or views in the source are added, dropped or modified. When these changes occur, most warehousing tools today can only detect something changed between the source and target, but leave the users on the hunt to reconcile the differences. The re-import function of Oracle9i Warehouse Builder, on the other hand, will reconcile any changes in the source and target objects and synchronize the source objects with their repository definitions. The user saves time maintaining the warehouse, as the hunt for asynchronous definitions of both source and target objects is eliminated.

Ad-hoc Query and Analysis with Oracle 9 i AS Discoverer
"BI demands a solid and reliable foundation in the form of a data warehouse," states Howard Dresner. While Oracle9i Warehouse Builder provides that foundation, BI requires the data to be rendered in an understandable and usable form that enables end users to take action. Oracle 9iAS Discoverer allows end users to query, browse and anaylize their critical information in just the way they need to see it.

Business Areas defined automatically : The tight integration between OWB and Discoverer allows users to easily populate business areas by using a wizard-based interface. The dimensions and hierarchies created in OWB are understood by Discoverer, which improves productivity and provides faster deployment to the end users for ad hoc query and analysis.

Leveraging Oracle9 i Database Analytic Functions : One of the most important improvements to relational databases has been the introduction of analytic functions. Discoverer leverages and extends Oracle9 i Analytic Functions that allows users to answer sophisticated business questions on demand. Powerful analytics like ranking, period-to-period comparisons and moving averages are now available to administrators and end users. Discoverer can also 'nest' the functions, allowing one function to build on the results of another, providing even more anlytical power. In addition, users can sort, pivot, and drill on the data to meet their analysis needs.

Web Analysis with Oracle 9 i AS Clickstream
The ad hoc query and analysis is extended to provide queries on Web log data. Oracle9 i AS Clickstream Intelligence is an integrated e-business intelligence application with Discoverer-based reports for measuring Web traffic and improving Web site effectiveness. Its pre-built data mart, predefined reports, and user-configurable dimensions provide a quickly deployed, flexible data warehouse infrastructure for clickstream analysis. Administrators and users can take full advantage of metadata sharing and the performance and scalability features in Oracle9 i Database.

Enterprise Reporting with Oracle 9 i DS Reports
Discoverer promotes sharing the queries with the enterprise via its tight integration with Oracle9 i DS Reports. The export feature of Discoverer allows for a full fidelity transfer. Information about layout, formatting, exceptions, parameters, and other features will be passed from Discoverer to Reports via XML. This allows users access to the full publishing capabilities of Reports without recreating the query.

Once the right information is generated, sharing the information across the enterprise before it becomes stale can be challenging. It is often necessary to combine data from additional sources like OLAP databases, or JDBC data sources. Oracle 9iDS Reports will permit multiple queries in the same report, where each query can be based on a different data source.

Generate once and deploy in any format : Reports has always been a powerful tool to publish data from the database in a variety of formats: PDF, XML, HTML, HTMLCSS, Postcript, PCL, Delimited text, and RTF. Now, users can publish data using industry-standard JSP's. This means that developers can create a Web page template using an HTML editor, then bring it into the Oracle 9 i DS Reports environment and integrate data from various data sources into that Web page. Furthermore, developers who have created their own custom output engines can plug those engines directly into Reports using the Pluggable Engines feature. Finally, because JSP's are used, when a report is updated, all the Web pages tagged with that report are updated instantly.

Generate once and deploy to any destination : Printer, Web, file-system, Email, and Oracle Portal are all destinations that Oracle Reports has supported for some time now on a wide variety of platforms. With Oracle9 i DS Reports, as well as greatly enhancing the product's out-of-the-box emailing capabilities, developers are now able to create their own java-based extensions to the Reports Server to open it up to previously unsupported destinations such as Fax, FTP, etc. The broadcast of this information can be done on-demand or scheduled, or even as a reaction to an event that has occurred within an Oracle9 i Database. Of course, administrators have the flexibility to secure Reports, Report Servers, and printers for fine-grade control of who can do what, where.

Customizing BI Systems with Oracle 9 i DS BI Beans
Oracle9i Business Intelligence Beans (BI Beans) in Oracle9 i DSJDeveloper (JDeveloper) is designed specifically to develop powerful business intelligence applications from high level, reusable components while taking advantage of Oracle9i OLAP capabilities.
Rapid Development of Custom Applications

JDeveloper and BI Beans provide the most productive development environment for building business intelligence applications. BI Beans provide high-level components that encapsulate the advanced analytic capabilities of Oracle 9 i OLAP for querying and presenting data. Applications can be deployed in the form of either servlets or Java applications. A BI Beans tag library is also available enabling the rapid development of JSPs.
Integrated OLAP

Advanced analytics are the heart of any business intelligence application. Oracle9 i OLAP provides centralized analytic processing in a scalable and secure environment. With unlimited query possibilities, users quickly leverage advanced database analytics to ask complex business questions of their data. Utilizing the BI Beans Catalog, users save and share their discoveries with others across the enterprise.

Advanced Intelligence Using Oracle 9 i Data Mining
Oracle9 i Data Mining allows companies to build advanced business intelligence applications that mine corporate databases to discover new insights and integrate those insights into business applications. The Oracle9 i Database has embedded data-mining functionality like classifications, predictions, and associations. This allows application developers to integrate data-mining capabilities into their business intelligence applications to support such activities as:

• Preventing customer attrition
• Cross-selling to existing customers
• Acquiring new customers
• Detecting fraud
• Identifying the most profitable customers
• Profiling customers with more accuracy

Oracle9 i Data Mining opens the door for integrating sophisticated data-mining capabilities, once the domain of specialized servers, into mainstream business intelligence applications.

Real Time Recommendations with Oracle 9 i AS Personalization
Developers use Oracle9 i AS Personalization's Recommendation Engine API to equip a Web site to tag, or capture, a visitor's "clicks" and to request real-time recommendations. These "click" data are combined with historical data within the Oracle9 i AS Personalization schema, and passed to the Oracle9 i AS Personalization Recommendation Engine. The Recommendation Engine searches for "rules" or recommendations that best fit the current session and historical data scenario and passes the recommendations to the Web application in a fraction of a second. Oracle9 i AS Personalization collects and stores the data, then builds predictive models all within Oracle9 i Database. Next, the powerful data mining technology embedded in Oracle9 i Database automatically discovers individualized behavior patterns to generate highly accurate personalized recommendations in real time.

Personal BI Dashboard with Oracle 9 i AS Portal
Oracle9 i AS Portal is a complete framework for development and deployment of web-based portals. It includes user administration, security, content customization, and development features to create and maintain basic reports, charts, and form-based applications. Creating a Business Intelligence dashboard personalized by job role is easy with Oracle9 i AS Portal. Charts and/or reports representing key performance indicators (KPI's) can be rapidly developed. These charts and reports are deployed as portlets. Individual users may customize their portal presentation by selecting the KPI portlets that are most relevant to their management focus.

Oracle9 i for Business Intelligence
Oracle9 i for Business Intelligence is the only complete and integrated business intelligence solution on the market today. Built on Oracle9 i Database - the foundation for superior reliability and scalability - Oracle9 i provides business intelligence functionality out of the box. Oracle9 i is an open and extensible architecture for developing analytical applications, and is recognized by DM Review as number one in Business Intelligence.