working on applications and technology

Both BI Server and the data model of Oracle business intelligence is invisible to end user, All the visible components to end user is controlled by the BI Presentation Service.

BI Presentation Service is an addon of the web server that accept request from end user. If you 're familiar with Siebel CRM, you will notice that BI Presentation Service is very similiar with Siebel SWSE.

What does the presentation service do?

Presentation service focus on BI user interaction and UI design while BI Server repository focus on data model design.

Presentation Service + BI Server = UI format + Data

This architecture of OBIEE also apply the popular design that separate UI design from the actual data generation rules.

While data model is store in a file called repository file (rpd), the UI design of the BI is also stored in a file called presentation catalog which provide forms, fonts, colors template and other format for the data

Presentation Service - OBIEE Client

OBIEE Client - the word 'client' is actually misleading , because we 're not talking about traditional client that need to be installed into our laptop, It is just some web applications runing on the web server(presentation service) of OBIEE that we could access through our web browser. I prefer not to call them 'Client' myself.

These presentation service applications include the components for end user or BI developer and BI administrator:

• Oracle BI interactive dashboards - the web home page for every BI user, It could be configured that each user or role has different BI analytic report and data.
• Oracle BI Answers - BI Answers is the most important component for BI report developer, It is the place where we could use a style of drap and drop data fields from the data model to define our analysis report and graph.
• Oracle BI Delivers - the alert machanism of OBIEE that could send out alert to subscribed user based on BI result.