1z0-591 Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite 11g Essentials Questions and Answers

The Catalog Manager workspace enables you to view and work with catalog objects. It displays the following folders for an open catalog:

The shared folder— Contains content that is shared among catalog users. This includes the preconfigured dashboards and analyses that are distributed with prebuilt applications, and other objects such as shared filters.

The system folder — Contains administrative elements of Presentation Services. Some of these elements are distributed with the product, and others are configured by you as the administrator, such as privileges. Avoid modifying any files in this folder. Presentation Services uses these files internally and modifying them might cause unexpected results.

The users folder — Contains content that catalog users with the appropriate permissions have saved to their personal folders, such as individual analyses.

NQSConfig.ini is the main configuration file of Bi Server and contains a lot of parameters.

The parameters in the Query Result Cache Section provide configuration information for Oracle BI Server caching. The query cache is enabled by default. After deciding on a strategy for flushing outdated entries, you should configure the cache storage parameters in Fusion Middleware Control and in the NQSConfig.INI file.

There are two types of session variables:

System — A session variable that the Oracle BI Server and Oracle BI Presentation Services use for specific purposes.

System session variables have reserved names that cannot be used for other kinds of variables (such as static or dynamic repository variables and non-system session variables).

Non-system — A system variable that the administrator creates and names. For example, the administrator might create a SalesRegion non-system variable that initializes the name of a user's sales region.

The administrator creates non-system session variables using the Oracle BI Administration Tool.

Note: Session Variables

A session variable is a variable that is initialized at login time for each user. When a user begins a session, the Oracle BI Server creates a new instance of a session variable and initializes it.

There are as many instances of a session variable as there are active sessions on the Oracle BI Server. Each instance of a session variable could be initialized to a different value.

The “Edit Column Formula” dialog box has a second,

very tiny tab called, “Bins.” You can use this tab to have OBIEE

build a CASE statement for you in a formula (you can also create

a CASE statement yourself by using one of the functions that

appears under “Expressions” if you want). A CASE statement is a

lot like an IF-THEN-ELSE statement, except that it’s a little easier

to read when you have multiple options. Basically, it puts values

in different buckets that you define.

Note:

Figure:

BI EE uses the ADM driver to extract the data from HFM.

Note: HFM (Hyperion Financial Management)

Example:

I EE connects to HFM through JavaHost. So, the setup for configuring the connectivity is to basically make the EPM environment variables available for access to BI EE. Before making the changes, there are a couple of things to be aware of

1. Ensure that DCOM is enabled on the BI Server machine. This is needed for HFM client to work/connect properly with HFM Server.

2. Ensure that HFM Client is installed.

The above assumes EPM 11.1.2.x version. If you are on Hyperion 9.3.3, then you need to have the ADM drivers installed manually. All of this is documented clearly. So, rather than re-iterating that i will just point to the link here. Ensure that you follow all the steps mentioned in the docs else you will have issues in the connectivity. Once all the pre-requisite steps are done, we start off with the metadata import process.

This warning indicates that the given column is only mapped to logical table sources that are disabled. The warning brings this issue to the repository developer's attention in case the default behavior is not desired.

Note 1: OBIEE offers two calculation types for measure in the repository:

logical

physical

You can define calculations in either of the following ways:

* Before the aggregation, in the logical table source.

* After the aggregation, in a logical column derived from two other logical columns. For example: sum(col A) * sum(col B)

Note 2: A measure column is a column unlike the baseline column that has a default aggregation rule defined in the Aggregation tab of the Logical Column dialog in the repository.

Measure columns always calculate the aggregation with which they are defined.

Measures need to be defined in a logical fact. Any column with an aggregation rule is a measure.

Initialization blocks are used to initialize dynamic repository variables, system session variables, and nonsystem session variables.

Modeling Time Series Function in OBIEE

Modeling Time Series Data

Time series functions provide the ability to compare business performance with previous time periods, allowing you to analyze data that spans multiple time periods. For example, time series functions enable comparisons between current sales and sales a year ago, a month ago, and so on.

Because SQL does not provide a direct way to make time comparisons, you must model time series data in the Oracle BI repository. First, set up time dimensions based on the period table in your data warehouse. Then, you can define measures that take advantage of this time dimension to use the AGO, TODATE, and PERIODROLLING functions.

The principal connection to an OBI Server inside the Oracle BI System is made through an Odbc Connection.

OBI Server can handle multiple repository but you can connect to only one at the same time by DSN Odbc Connection. Therefore, you must set up an ODBC connection for each repository.

Note: The Administration tool is used to manage OBIEE server and have some capabilities to automate some repetitive tasks and principally his embedded tools.

Oracle Business Intelligence Administration Tool is available only for Windows operating systems.

The Administration Tool is a Windows application that allows the BI Server administrator to create and edit repositories.

Repositories can be edited with the administration tool in either online or offline mode.

The Administration Tool also includes a session manager and a cache manager which are available in online mode. The Cache Manager displays what queries have been cached and how frequently they have been accessed. You can also select and delete items

If security attributes conflict, a user or group is granted the least restrictive security attribute.

You should use a logical column (not physical). In fact,in the Explanation of the exam, it displays a logical column.

C: OBIEE Caching and Cache Seeding

Cache is a component that improves performance by transparently storing data such that future requests for the same criteria can be served much faster. Like other application cache is not virtual memory in OBIEE. In OBIEE cache will be stored as files on the Hard Disk of the OBIEE Server in the form of files. By Default caching is enabled in the OBIEE server configuration.

For time-consuming Dashboard Pages, we can use the concept of cache seeding in OBIEE, this can be configured as a scheduled job that will ensure that the data is cached and readily available as and when the user runs the dashboard.

B: Before you can run Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Installer, you must first create

required Oracle Business Intelligence schemas in an unhardened database. You use

a tool called the Repository Creation Utility (RCU) to create these schemas with

the appropriate permissions and data.

E: The database 11gR2 is required if you want to run the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus Samples

One Oracle Database Preinstalled and not hardened to host the schemas.

Security Realms are an Oracle Platform Security Services concept and bring together sets of users, groups, providers and so on for a WebLogic domain.

Screenshot below.

Oracle Essbase developers creating planning and budgeting applications have been keenly aware of the advantages and disadvantages of the two different storage types available to them:

* Block storage option (BSO) databases support a wide range of calculations, including forecasts, allocations, and aggregations through procedural calculation scripts. The results of these calculations can be written back to the database, but applications that use BSO storage are limited to about 10 dimensions and member counts in the low hundreds of thousands.

* Aggregate storage option (ASO) databases can support about 20 dimensions and member counts in the millions. ASO databases use multidimensional functions rather than procedural scripts to perform calculations, but the results of queries cannot be stored back in the database, making ASO unsuitable for most financial management applications.

If you want to create a dynamic time-series reference such as the value of a measure as at this time last year, or over the past three months, or year-to-date, you can use one of the OBIEE time-series functions (AGO, PERIODROLLING, TODATE) to provide an offset value for a measure.

Figure:

Note: OBIEE 11g offered a bunch of improvements that were particularly aimed at Essbase, and other OLAP server, customers; the new hierarchical columns feature brought proper OLAP analysis to OBIEE, and coupled with OLAP-oriented features such as hierarchical prompts and selection steps, made OBIEE 11g a much more conducive environment for Essbase users.

There’s much better support for Essbase-native features such as value-based hierarchies, alternate hierarchies, multiple alias tables, UDAs and other Essbase artifacts, and the value-based hierarchy feature in particular is very welcome as it can avoid the need to completely re-import your Essbase database if your outline gains additional hierarchy levels.

So coupled with the new and improved visualization capabilities in OBIEE 11g, including maps, scorecards, improved dashboard controls, the whole new UI, improved BI Publisher and so on, there’s a lot to recommend OBIEE 11g to users of the “legacy” Hyperion tools looking for a bit of a refresh of their BI environment.

A:

* Combining Relational and OLAP Data Sources: Oracle’s Common Enterprise Information Model allows users to combine data from a relational system and an OLAP source in a single calculation. For example, a user can compare sales forecasts from an Oracle CRM System with budget data from an Oracle Essbase planning application. To clients of the Common Enterprise Information Model, the forecast and budget data appear to be from the same logical source.

* The Essbase server provides advanced multi-user read and write capabilities, including data update and multi-user recalculation. Business users with front-end tools can write data back to a server and recalculate the data on a server using calculation scripts—key functionality to support sophisticated modeling and planning applications.

* Using aggregate storage, Essbase serves a wide range of analytic needs—financial analysis, planning, budgeting, sales analysis, marketing analysis, supply-chain analysis, and profitability analytics—all from a single analytic infrastructure.

Note 2: Data model for business intelligence

The most important component of business intelligence is the concept of 'data model'. data model determinde what kind of analysis that end user could do with the data. It is also an independant concept that could span across different vendor 's product.

Unlike data model of the transaction system, the typical analytic data model is often denormalized and store extra data for analytic query and better query performance while transaction data model use is often normalized and optimized for a few data read and write, which is implemented by jointing many tables.

The most common used analytic data model in business intelligence is call the 'Star schema' data model.

With the Oracle business intelligence system, We could define star schema and dimension data model in the 'logical layer' in the admin tools. The data model in OBIEE could span different data source in physical layer, which means OBIEE have the capability of building one logical data model which is actually connect to different database in the backend

After creating your base metrics, try using the Calculation Wizard to automate the process of creating time-series metrics or comparison metrics such as: Change, Percent Change, Index, and Percent. The Wizard may save you many hours of time and frustration, especially if you have to create more than a handful of these metrics. In addition, the Wizard allows you to include customized logic to handle nulls in the base metrics. You may refer to the Oracle documentation for further detail.

Purge and reseed once a week after the reports have run to improve report response time.

Denormalized data in the transactional system could be divided into different tables to increase performance.

Query Limits. You can limit queries by the number of rows received, by maximum run time, and by restricting to particular time periods. You can also allow or disallow direct database requests or the Populate privilege.

See figure below.

B: Click Refresh All from the Oracle BI menu in PowerPoint to refresh all the refreshable objects in the presentation.

C: Right-click Table and select Insert as List from the shortcut menu. The Edit Prompts and Levels dialog box appears. Accept the default options and click Insert.

A: OBIEE 11g is centred on WebLogic Server as the underlying application server architecture.

B: If you want to scale out this infrastructure, you would typically run the OBIEE 11g installer on a second server, and instead of choosing to do a new install, you’d choose to instead scale out the existing BI domain.

C: OBIEE Clustering – Approach of Oracle BI Server Load balancing/Failover

The Essbase cube looks just like any other relational star schema in my Presentation Layer, however when it is queried Oracle BI Server will issue MDX queries against a multi-dimensional data source, rather than an SQL query against a relational star schema.

With the advent of 11G, MapViewer is installed as part of Oracle BI Enterprise Edition and deployed in the same domain as Oracle BI EE on the Web application server.

Before content designers can create map views, in the Manage map Data Administration page, the metadata must be configured:

* layers (theme) and map (zoom level)

* the mapping between Oracle BI EE data and spatial data

Content Tab

Aggregation Content

You can define the aggregation (ie the group by) of:

by hierarchy level

by logical column

It helps you to define an aggregate navigation

Note: logical table source

Logical table sources define the mappings from a single logical table to one or more physical tables. A logicaltable contains one or more logical table source. The mapping between physical columns and logical columns are done in this element.

The definition of the logical table source is used:

to specify transformations/calculations (in the column mapping tab),

to enable aggregate navigation and fragmentation (in the content tab)

The Content tab of the Logical Table Source is used to define :

any aggregate table content definitions (specify the grain of the physical tables),

fragmented table definitions for the source,

and WHERE clauses (if you want to limit the number of rows returned).