Siebel Analytics

BI Suite Enterprise Edition Getting Started:

I have been spending the last few days setting up BI Reports using BI Suite Enterprise Edition as a proof of concept for Business users to evaluate the Product.

I have liked the Product so far,
(i) very user friendly
(ii)once the metadata layer is defined Business users are masked from underlying tables and relationships they don’t need to know about
(iii)A lot of sleek display features in the Product.
(iv)Skill Level not extremely difficult. If you have worked in the Database and BI world it should be fairly easy to learn how to use the Product.
(v) I will review a step by step evaluation of the Product once I have it installed in my system.

Details on the Product:

Key feature of the Product (mainly Siebel Analytics/Answers):

(i)Has a BI Server ; BI Web Console; BI Admin Client Tool
(ii)BI Server is not integrated with the 10g Application Server (it runs separately and is not a container in your Application Server like the way it was with Discoverer)
(iii)I believe there are claims that with 11G App Server the OEM Console can manage the BI Server as well.
(iv)When a request is sent to the webserver a Logical query is sent to the BI Server – The BI Server then checks if the data is in the Cache – if not in the cache a physical SQL is sent to the database.
(v)All metadata information is stored in flat files as opposed to any repository – so should be easy to move across environments – the metadata flat files also support multiuser capability.
(vi)Security Services available with your BI Server (VPD security)
(vii)BI Admin Tools – has pretty much 3 layers (a) the Physical Layer where datasources are defined; ODBC is used to define the datasources (b) the Business/ Mappings layer where you build your Business mappings and (c) Presentation Layer where define how your data needs to be presented.
(viii)The Webconsole has (a) Answers – this is what is used by your Business users to create Reports using data items available in your presentation layer. (b)Dashboard – is where Reports built using Answers can be published on your Dashboard (c)Admin – to manage user accounts , analytics catalog, dash board permissions etc (d) Delivers – can schedule jobs for web cache refreshes. Also Oracle XML Publisher is a part of the BI EE Suite

I am excited about having all our Reports moved to Siebel Analytics – I will have an end to end sneak preview of the Product posted on my blog soon.