OBIEE?

Hye what’s up guys? It’s me again here. How you’re doing? Everything okay? Today I would like to talk about OBIEE. What is OBIEE? It is a reporting tool used to develop and access the reports, also known as Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition which had been included in my syllabus during the 3 months training with VTC Holding and has been covered by Sin Hui at the end of third week of first month for 5 days.

                So basically, what is OBIEE? It is a portfolio of technology and applications that provides the industry’s first integrated, end-to-end Enterprise Performance Management System, including BI foundation and tools. OBIEE provides user the data and tools to answer questions that are important to running the part of the business for which they are responsible. In my syllabus, we learned 11g version of OBIEE which is a comprehensive business intelligence platform that delivers a full range of analytic and reporting capabilities.

There are number of capabilities within the OBIEE 11g suit such as role-based dashboards, proactive alerts, mobile access, integration with Microsoft Office (Word, Excel), logical view of data, and multiple data sources. Four products included in the OBI installation package are OBIEE, OBI Publisher, OBI Add-in for MS Office, and OBI Administration Tool. There are steps that needs to be followed to setup OBI products, if user failed or missed 1 step, they will face some error and need to start again.

To start using OBIEE, user need to start the Oracle database first step by step using Oracle Virtual Machine that was installed on week 1. Some of the steps are entering command “.oraenv”, “orcl”, and login to the database by entering “sqlplus / as sysdba” and then start the database by typing “start”. After that the user can start the OBIEE with the following steps; start the weblogic first by changing to the required directory and command “./startWebLogic.sh” followed by Node Manager, Managed Server, Oracle Process Manager and Notification server (OPMN) as the steps has been given in the slide provided by the trainers. While if the user wants to stop the OBIEE, they need to do the same steps as starting the OBIEE but reverse from OPMN to weblogic.

Those steps are provided for those who want to start and stop OBIEE from the terminal command in Oracle Virtual Machine, but there are also some steps can be done from a web based application called Enterprise Manager (EM) 11g Fusion Middleware Control, as it can do more task rather than start and stop OBIEE only. By default, the EM link provided will be http://<host>:7001/em unless user change it. Different with EM link, the default OBIEE link is http://localhost:9704/analytics and enter user ID and password given by administrator.

Once user logged into the OBIEE server, they may be start to make a report requested by client by navigating to New Analysis and pick the subsequent subject area that will be used to make the report. User may display the report by using normal table, pivot table, narrative view, graph view, ticker view, view selector view, or column selector view based on the requirement.

Oracle Database

Hello! How you doing? Today I want to share about what I’ve learned on my 3 months training with GBS Iskandar about Oracle Database. On my first week, I’ve learned about Oracle Database Architecture which are storage structure, tablespace, data files, and Automatic Storage Management (ASM). We need to fully understand on the architecture before move further into the details of studies of Oracle Database. Before entering the data, a table need to be created. A tablespace is needed in Oracle Database to store data inserted into the database.

                We also learned about Oracle Database Management Tools and the basic three are SQL Plus, SQL Developer, and Enterprise Manager. SQL Developer is a tool for beginners start querying some data but usually being used for unit testing. SQL Developer need to be configured well before use and the database has to be created. While Enterprise Manager is a web based Oracle Database application to configure the privileges, security, and data files. It can be logged in as sysdba or normal user. While SQL Plus is a more like command tool and the functionalities are not as much as SQL Developer. SQL Plus can be called in terminal in Oracle Virtual Machine Terminal but need to start the listener first.

                Next, managing Database Instance using Initialization parameters, Listener and Sessions. These are the steps needed before connecting to the database. The listener need to be configured well because it is the crucial part. If the listener is wrong, the database will refuse to connect because it didn’t found the listener. We also been given chance to do some training on setting up database instance because every morning we need to start the database before start the class.

                We also learned on administering user security such as privileges, authenticating, user roles, and password profiles. The user security administration can be accessed only by user with sysdba privileges, in Enterprise Manager. Oracle database also provide Block Space Management, Row Chaining and Migration, Compression, and Managing Undo Data which divided into two parts; Managing Undo and Temporary Undo. On managing undo data, we were using the undo advisor.

                At the end of the first week, we learned on managing data concurrency such as locks, DML lock, lock conflicts, and deadlocks. When the deadlocks occur, Oracle Database automatically detects and terminates the statement with and error. The proper response to the error is either commit or rollback, which will release any other locks in that session so that the other session can continue its transaction.

                On week two, we learned on backup and recovery which have been divided into some parts; categories of failures, flashback, checkpoint, redo lock, and point-in-time recovery. There are some categories of failure;

statement failure (a single database operation; select, insert, update, or delete fails),

user process failure (a single database session fails), network failure (connectivity to the database is lost),

user error (a user successfully completes an operation, but the operation is incorrect),

instance failure (the database instance shuts down unexpectedly),

media failure (a loss of any file that is needed for database operation).

Oracle provides an appropriate data protection and solution depending on user’s backup and recovery objective; Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN), Oracle Secure Backup (OSB), Oracle Database Flashback, Data Recovery Advisor, and Data Guard and Active Data Guard.

                Next, we also learned on defining the data using select statement from basic to advance, restricting and sorting data to limit and sort the rows that are retrieved by a query and learn to use ampersand substitution. We need to use WHERE clause, comparison conditions, and logical conditions such as AND, OR, and NOT operators. Next, how to customize the output. Because of the variation of data type, there are types of customizing the output; single-row SQL functions containing character, number, and date, conversion and general functions.