Chapter 2. Introducing Oracle Business Intelligence

You know by now that Oracle Business Intelligence allows you to go beyond simple database-driven applications with the help of SQL queries to derive information from the data being collected and stored. Oracle Business Intelligence is implemented as a collection of components grouped into suites, which are part of either Oracle Application Server or Oracle Fusion Middleware. As you will learn in this chapter, however, Oracle Business Intelligence is not limited to those components alone. Oracle Database also provides a number of natively supported Business Intelligence features, such as data warehousing, Online Analytical Processing (OLAP), and analytic SQL functions. These features will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter, as well as in Chapter 5, Warehousing for Analysis and Reporting, which is dedicated to data warehousing.

This chapter covers getting up and running with Oracle Business Intelligence, including the following...

What Oracle Business Intelligence is comprised of

In the preceding chapter, you saw a brief example of the Oracle Discoverer Plus, an Oracle Business Intelligence component, in action. As mentioned previously, this chapter will discuss the components included in the Oracle Business Intelligence and Oracle Business Intelligence Tools suites in more detail, including their installation. Before proceeding to the installation though, let's take a closer look at the Oracle Business Intelligence components, trying to determine "what is what" within it.

Oracle Business Intelligence components

To start with, let's determine what kind of problems the Oracle Business Intelligence components are designed to solve. The following list enumerates these problems:

• Structuring data for analysis

• Analyzing data

• Creating reports

• Viewing and sharing reports

Now, you might wonder what Oracle Business Intelligence components are available and which problem each of them is designed to solve. The following is a list...

Installing Oracle Business Intelligence software

The following sections will walk you through the steps necessary to obtain and install Oracle Business Intelligence software, which you will need in order to follow the examples throughout the rest of this book.

The software you will need

As mentioned, you have more than one option when it comes to Oracle Business Intelligence software. Currently, the two most popular options are the following:

• Oracle Business Intelligence suite, part of Oracle Application Server 10g Release 2

• Portal, Forms, Reports, and Discoverer suite, part of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g Release 1

The first option—the Oracle Business Intelligence suite, part of Oracle Application Server 10g Release 2—includes the following components:

• Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer

• Oracle HTTP Server

• Oracle Application Server Containers for J2EE (OC4J)

• Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Application Server Control

• Oracle Application Server Web Cache

• Oracle Application Server Reports Services...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to install and configure an Oracle Business Intelligence solution. In particular, you walked through the steps of installing the Oracle Business Intelligence suite and Oracle Business Intelligence Tools suite, including configuration steps discussed in the "Post-installation tasks" section.

You should now have Oracle Business Intelligence components installed and ready to work on your computer. In the next chapter, we'll step aside and take a look at the Oracle Database Business Intelligence features. Then, in Chapter 4, we'll come back to the Business Intelligence components discussed in this chapter.