OBIEE comprises powerful BI server technology and BI presentation tools - referred to as Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) - and supplements them with specialty BI reporting tools secured in the Hyperion acquisition (Plus). Together, these technologies offer significant business intelligence functionality to enable the insight driven enterprise.
OBIEE is an integrated suite sharing a common service-oriented architecture; common data access services; common analytic and calculation infrastructure; common metadata management services; a common semantic business model; a common security model and user preferences; and common administration tools. It is designed to provide mission-critical scalability and performance with data source specific optimized request generation, optimized data access, advanced calculation, intelligent caching services, and clustering.
OBIEE consists of several interdependent components, with the Oracle BI Server at its core.
§ Oracle BI Server — a highly scalable, highly efficient query and analysis server that integrates data via sophisticated query federation capabilities from multiple relational, unstructured, OLAP, and pre-packaged application sources, whether Oracle or non-Oracle.
§ Oracle BI Answers — a powerful ad-hoc query and analysis tool that works against a logical view of information from multiple data sources in a pure Web environment.
§ Oracle BI Interactive Dashboard — rich, interactive pure Web dashboards that display personalized information to help guide users in effective decision making.
§ Oracle BI Publisher — a highly scalable reporting engine capable of generating reports from multiple data sources in multiple formats via multiple delivery channels.
§ Oracle BI Briefing Books — reports that capture a series of snapshots of an Oracle BI Dashboard or report allowing the information to be viewed offline presentation style.
§ Oracle BI Disconnected Analytics — a packaged solution to offer Answers and Dashboards to mobile professionals on computers disconnected from the network.
§ Oracle BI Office Plug-In — automatically synchronizes information from Answers to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
§ Oracle BI Delivers — an alerting engine to capture and distribute notifications via multiple channels in response to predefined business events to speed decision making.
Ø Oracle Answers is the only report building interface that OBIEE provides
Ø It is used for the construction of both Queries (the data) and Reports (the presentation)
Ø Dashboards are simply containers for reports and other content
Ø Native connectivity for sources such as Oracle, DB2, Teradata, SQL Server etc. Uses ODBC for MS Access
