Introduction to Oracle BI Enterprise Edition Plus

Presented by:  Adam Lee, Product Manager, Oracle

My first session of the day was a little dry.  The overview was very typical Oracle stuff:  A bunch of slides displaying block-pyramids with each block sporting important terms like “INFRASTRUCTURE” and “ABSTRACTION ENGINE.”  I was hoping to see potential support impact on Blue Gecko.  Eventually, some of our E-Business Suite customers, if not others, will implement BI.

Truthfully, I don’t know a tremendous amount about implementing Oracle BI.  This was an overview session that explained the high-level BI components and how they allow seamless heterogeneous access to heterogeneous data sources.  It all sounds fine, but when pressed with questions regarding configuration difficulties, Mr. Lee deflected a bit; this was not a technical session.

Without repeating the entire content of the presentation, the success of BI depends on configuring the Common Enterprise Information Model, which is a core function of the BI server itself.  Defining business rules, dimensions, access rules, etc. is the entire chore – if your data is very disparate and does not relate well across systems, this session implied you might not get a ton out of BI until that’s addressed.

The discussion degraded at one point into (substantial) confusion regarding licensing, discoverer, and other details.

The whole thing sounds very confusing – it might have been better to provide a demo with the overview.

On the other hand, there are packaged BI solutions for E-Business Suite and other Oracle applications (PeopleSoft, Seibel, etc.) with pre-built metadata.  I expect that the ramp up time on these is far shorter than, say, linking a bunch of Microsoft cubes, Oracle E-Business Suite, and a legacy DB2 database.

Overall, pretty dry, a little confusing, but I think I have a better idea of what BI architecture looks like, which is what I was hoping for.