working on applications and technology

What does a business intelligence system made of?

whether the business intelligence product is from Oracle or SAP, They usually provide similar concept for implementing a business intelligence system. These concept is the core of business intelligence and usually share common view even for different company 's products!

These three concept is usually the main concern for building business intelligence system:

1. Data access: is the layer that define the access to different backend system data
2. Data model: is the core of the business intelligence which define the 'analysis model' for the system
3. Data analysis or data presentation: is the component that present the analytis table of data or analysis graph to end user.

OBIEE - data access

An unevitable situation of today 's information system is the fact that our data is actually reside at various system and different department in the enterpirse, for enterpirse wide data analysis, We need an effective ways to draw data from different system and make analysis.

There 're two traditional methods of dealing with this problem:

1. Move data from different system into one system which is usually call datawarehouse or datamart. and then we could do data analysis on top of the data. This approach is call ETL.
2. consolidate all the data vitually. We could build some kind of views on top of data reside in different backend system, There 's no need to move data, we'd rather issue different SQL to different system and consolidate the result across all these systems. To be more technically, When we submit our query to the OBIEE system, The BI Server decompose the query into sub-query that will be submited to different backend system(defined in physical layer, might contain Oracle database, DB2 or MSSQL datasource). The BI system will then combine all the execution result from different backend system and combine them into meaningful result and return the result to the end user.

   This is more complext approach, but It does demonstrate one capability of OBIEE, The BI server of OBIEE does this decompose-combine process automatically while the end user might not even be aware of where the data actually reside.

   

   This vitualization is useful for the situation if our data source is moved to another place or changed to another system, Cause we could just change the definition of the data source without impacting the data model and data analysis presentation. The layer of OBIEE that does this job is call physical layer, We could define as many physical system data source as we wish in the physical layer, all of these physical data source will be merge into one data model in the OBIEE logical layer that we will talk about in another article (the data model layer)!