The latest trend in the industry is "Intelligence" aka "Business Intelligence" aka "Analytics". Oracle not to be outdone has jumped head first into this market with their OBIEE tool. OBIEE (pronounced "Oh-Bee-Eye-Eee-Eee") is a suite of reporting and analytic tools that Oracle purchased with some stuff that they built themselves. These are primarily Siebel and Hyperion (Siebel became OBIEE, Siebel + Hyperion became OBIEE Plus) and Oracle XML Publisher.
Personally, I have found OBIEE to be confusing because (a) there are so many moving pieces and (b) the marketing info does not line up exactly with the product itself. This is my attempt to simplify OBIEE into the few tools that matter most.
Oracle BI Server
BI Server is the backbone of OBIEE - it is where the ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) happens. You defined the data sources, mapping rules, security, and group the data into logical Subject Areas. This is a one time setup - the only time you would need to modify this again is to add a new field, table, or data source. All of this setup is done via the Oracle BI Administration tool.
Presentation Services
Presentation Services is where you build the actual reports. Inside you find Oracle Answers and Interactive Dashboards. Both use the Subject Areas that were setup in the BI Administration tool to determine which tables/fields are available. Answers is the report builder -it allows you to build roster style reports, graphs/charts, pivot tables, and many other formats.
Interactive Dashboards allows you to pull in your Answers reports and present them to end users in dashboards. There are a few cool things about these dashboards. You can combine reports from multiple subject areas - for example, a department manager can see their OT costs from payroll, new hires in HR, and dependents who are about to age out in benefits. You also get one stop shopping for information - information can be displayed in summary, in full, or as a link. In this example we show the latest LOA changes - but there is also a link to see the full list. If you have super users you can give them access to build their own dashboard based on existing Answers reports - or even allow them to build answers reports on their own.
BI Publisher
BI Publisher allows you to do some similar things as Answers - but the output is a little different. BI Publisher reports are typically in PDF or Excel format. The cool thing about this is you can build perfectly formatted letters with your company logo, other graphics, and basically anything that you can do with Microsoft Word. The reports can be run directly out of BI Publisher or it can be pulled into the Interactive Dashboards.
There are 2 parts to BI Publisher - the BI Publisher Server and BI Publisher Desktop (it used to be called XML Publisher Desktop). BI Publisher Server is where you build the data part of the report. It gives you a drag and drop query builder so you don't need to know SQL. The queries can be based on the Subject Areas that you build in the BI Administration tool or you can connect directly another database. Once your data is built, you use BI Publisher Desktop (which is nothing more than a plug-in to Microsoft Word) to built a template to format the data. The template is just like using Mail Merge in Word only you use this custom menu instead.
Oracle BI Delivers
Technically this is part of the Presentation Services - but it probably deserves its own mention. BI Delivers is a way of scheduling and delivering your dashboards and reports. It uses these things called "iBots". With an iBot you can select the reports you want to run, the frequency, and the delivery method. You can choose to email yourself (or others) PDFs, imbedded emails, links back to OBIEE.
And that is the basics. Yes, there are many features and functionality beyond what I talked about here. But hopefully this gives you a basic understanding of what OBIEE is. The next step is figure out what to do with all of it.
