We continue on in our review of Oracle Fusion Applications Development and Extensibility Handbook (Oracle Press) to chapters 11 and 12 which look at Reporting and Analytics respectively.

Reporting in Fusion Apps is based upon OBIEE rather than vanilla BI Publisher against the application database. This means that you and build your reporting capability against a far more diverse set of data sources (license permitting of course). It does also mean that the steps for creating reports at least to start with are more complex as OBIEE realizes a multi-tier approach to report generation. The chapter goes onto to describe the types of data source, the means by which reports can be configured conditional execution and then through ideas such as ‘bursting’ where the report generating process can be partitioned and run in parallel by multiple processes each concentrate on a range of data (sound a little like Map Reduce doesn’t it). Finally how to format the output. All of which is then supported with a detailed illustration.  As you might imagine there are prepackaged reports and templates, so loading and configuring these in an environment is considered.

The book recognises that in a single chapter you can only really scratch the surface of reporting and makes reference to other tools in the OBIEE kit bag such as OTBI (Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence) BI and Mobile BI composer.  The only little trick here is the opportunity to point out some good sources of information.  But that isn’t a significant, there is such a thing as Google and it might take a bit more reading to find the best resources around these tools.

Chapter 12 looks briefly at the use of Analytics through OBIA (Oracle Business Intelligence Applications), Oracle Hyperion (also known as Essbase) that is available with Financial Reporting studio and focuses on OBTI. The chapter feels pretty standalone from the preceding chapter on reporting – which when using the book more as a reference is great, but from a cover to cover read can niggle a little, particularly when both chapters rely on OBIEE background.  But to be honest we are nit picking here. As with previous chapters there is an illustrated scenario walked through (the layout of which isn’t as good as previous chapters – but it is a relative observation), the illustration perhaps misses the opportunity for a killer blow of referencing the core app customisation to show how you might bind the dynamic reporting provided by OBTI view into the core CRM with the customisation. I have to say I am impressed by the OBTI technologies given the integration into the Fusion security framework, leveraging ADF and its optimisation strategies – all of which are clearly explained here.

It would have been nice to explore OBIA and Oracle Hyperion a bit further, but doing so would probably have warranted additional chapters. Overall a good chapter again, covering a lot of capability efficiently.

OTBI Architecture

Previous Chapter reviews:

• • Chapters 1 & 2
  • Chapters 3 & 4
  • Chapters 5 & 6
  • Chapters 7 & 8
  • Chapters 9 & 10