Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g: A Hands-On Tutorial [Paperback]

Christian Screen (Author), Haroun Khan (Author), Adrian Ward (Author)

Book Description

Release date: July 19, 2012

Leverage the latest Fusion Middleware Business Intelligence offering with this action-packed implementation guide

• Get to grips with the OBIEE 11g suite for analyzing and reporting on your business data
• Immerse yourself in BI upgrading techniques, using Agents and the Action Framework and much more in this book and e-book
• A practical, from the coalface tutorial, bursting with step by step instructions and real world case studies to help you implement the suite’s powerful analytic capabilities

In Detail

The Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g (OBIEE) suite delivers a full range of analytic and reporting capabilities, coupled with powerful user experience for creating reports, dashboards and more with your business data. "Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g: A Hands-On Tutorial" will have you unleashing that power in no time, helping you to take action and make the right decisions ataglance.

"Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g: A Hands-On Tutorial" provides you with valuable insight and the step-by-step know-how you need to take advantage of everything the Oracle BI suite has to offer you, all utilizing real world case studies for a true implementation in action.

"Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g: A Hands- on Tutorial" takes you on a journey right from inception to a full working OBI 11g System. Using a real-world data walkthrough you'll explore topics like architecture, reporting and leveraging Essbase as a data source, as well as building the Oracle BI 11g metadata repository (RPD), and developing reports and dashboards in the new Fusion Middleware interface. This practical implementation guide equips you with from the coalface advice which will help you achieve a successful working application by journey's end.

What will you learn from this book

• Run though a full sample upgrade from a 10g repository using the upgrade assistants
• Discover valuable best practices for designing a reporting database
• Go further with your dashboard knowledge by implementing changes to standard colors, graphics and messages
• Demonstrate how Agent options affect report delivery
• Quickly get up and running with BI Publisher and learn to publish reports with bursting and scheduling
• Speed up your OBIEE system with performance best practices such as Scale out and Caching
• Go beyond out of the box solutions and develop great management tools
• Make your knowledge stick by ending each chapter with a self review and further learning resources

Approach

"Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g: A Hands- On Tutorial" is a practical, from the coalface tutorial for beginner to intermediate readers. You'll benefit from plenty of emphasis on the introduction of new features of the suite and go further with step by step instructions from the experts.

Who this book is written for

If you are a BI developer or analyst who wants to get practical with your OBIEE 11g knowledge, "Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g: A Hands-On Tutorial" is for you. You will also find it helpful as a technical administrator, consultant or end user.

You should already have a good command of general BI practices and Oracle database, but no knowledge of Oracle BI 11g is required.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Christian Screen

Christian Screen is a Business Intelligence evangelist with over 15 years of experience in technology ranging from low-level programming, e-commerce, Data Warehousing, Enterprise Performance Management, and of course, Business Intelligence. In his day job he is a Senior Manager for Capgemini North America's Oracle Analytics Practice. In his spare time he enjoys writing technical articles, learning new technologies, inventing, writing software, spending time with his family, trying to change the world, and running his blog and podcast at ArtOfBi.com.

Haroun Khan

Haroun Khan is one of Europe's leading OBIEE consultants. A Comp Sci graduate of Imperial College, London, he has been involved with OBIEE from its early days as an acquisition from nQuire by Siebel, and subsequently as part of the Oracle family. Haroun has worked as a consultant on projects worldwide for Siebel and as a Principal Consultant for Oracle over a period of 10 years. He has specialized in BI and data warehousing over a longer period including time working at MicroStrategy. Haroun now free-lances in leading and designing projects in the BI and data warehousing space, combining this with entrepreneurial activities such as his own e-commerce business jrpass.com. In his downtime, Haroun likes to spend as much time as possible in the mountains, away from a computer screen and avoiding numerous requests to write a blog or get on another plane!

Adrian Ward

Adrian Ward started working in Siebel Analytics back in 2001 and quickly realized the potential in the technology. He formed the UK’s first independent consultancy focusing purely on OBIEE (nee Siebel Analytics) and Oracle BI Applications. He has led many large successful OBIEE implementations in a wide range of sectors, from Investment Banking to Military operations. His deep technical OBIEE and BI Applications knowledge has been used on dozens of projects throughout the globe including HR, Sales, Service, Pharma and Custom Analytics. He was also one of the first bloggers on Oracle BIEE and today runs the Addidici OBIEE consultancy which has operations in the UK, Europe and South Africa. Adrian runs one of the largest Oracle BI networking groups on LinkedIn – "Oracle Business Intelligence", and helps others to network and learn about the product and its application, including organizing networking social events in London. In his spare time he loves sailing, skiing, enjoying life with his family, and learning new technology.

Product Details

• Paperback: 620 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (July 19, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1849685665
• ISBN-13: 978-1849685665
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 1.2 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #316,174 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars I'm not sure about this one yet. August 28, 2012

By Gregory Wynne

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

[edited] I initially found this book to be confusing in the handoff between the 6 chapters of setup - about 5 chapters more than I wanted to know - and the actual BI development. The available DDL and database dump appear to be for an Oracle database, which I would expect, as you probably don't have OBIEE without it anyway. The book indicates that we will be using MySQL for the database. That has me confused about the topology and whether I'll get stuck in a later chapter. However, after spending a day attempting to get the BI Admin tool to connect with an Oracle DB, I'm happy to take the easier MySQL option.

The first 6 chapters have me wondering who the target audience is. Setting up IIS, LDAP, etc is not typically the job of a developer. Devoting a chapter to upgrading from 10 to 11g, considering that the book audience is a new user who just installed 11g via the instructions, is just odd. Perhaps worth an appendix entry at the most.

Since i haven't finished the book, I'll reserve final judgement till then.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars BI primer in a book October 30, 2012

By Bryan Gardner

Format:Paperback

I have been reading the book (about 25% so far) and find it quite informative, easy to read, and well laid out so far. Being thrust into the Oracle stack and thusly Oracle BI, this book has helped me sort out the components, get up and running more smoothly, and start exploring Oracle BI with purpose and direction. There are many other BI offerings from PackT, great ones that I have on my virtual bookshelf, but I wish this one had come out first. A must for newbies, and hopefully a great asset as I gain experience.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars intricate collection August 11, 2012

By W Boudville HALL OF FAMETOP 500 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

Helpfully, the book starts by telling that you need no previous experience with Oracle Business Intelligence 11g. It descends from BI 10g and Siebel Analytics. But much of the GUI was rewritten compared to 10g, so the authors suggest that BI 11g will feel quite different to those acquainted with 10g.

The book also tries to plug together packages from many acquisitions made by Oracle in recent years. The term Fusion Middleware is a means to group many of those packages into a systematic overall offering, that is easier for users to understand. Interestingly, Oracle currently only supports its WebLogic server as the application server for all this. It has not made a move to using IBM's WebSphere as an alternative server. Though in time this may change.

The text provides a concise summation of the numerous packages with the BI Domain. And readers who are programmers may be interested to know that Oracle has effectively standardised on 2 languages - C++ and Java. (It of course owns Java, after its purchase of Sun.)

The installation is complex enough that several chapters are devoted to it. Which gives you a good idea of how involved the rest of the text will be. Typically these days, a book about a software product just has a short chapter near the start about installation, and the chapter is often a trivial read since the install will be mostly by defaults. In the current book, there is much more to understand and tweak, if you are so inclined.

The intricacy of the install can be extended to the observation that another chapter is just about upgrading from 10g of the Web Catalog (and of another product) to 11g.

Of the remainder of the text, you have a choice of topics. Perhaps not all will be needed by each reader. Of these, hopefully you will be able to quickly go over chapter 7, on reporting databases. It is a general read of the theory of relational databases. This should be well trod ground for most readers.

The really high end business intelligence is mostly in the final chapters. You have to first deal with a lot of details about how to set up a database. Relative to the size of the book, the pure BI discussion might seem sparse. Perhaps time for another book, strictly on BI.