Preface

This document describes Oracle's business intelligence products and provides guidelines for selecting the ones that best meet your needs.

This preface contains the following topics:

• Documentation Accessibility

• Audience

• Structure

• Related Documents

• Conventions

Documentation Accessibility

Our goal is to make Oracle products, services, and supporting documentation accessible, with good usability, to the disabled community. To that end, our documentation includes features that make information available to users of assistive technology. This documentation is available in HTML format, and contains markup to facilitate access by the disabled community. Standards will continue to evolve over time, and Oracle is actively engaged with other market-leading technology vendors to address technical obstacles so that our documentation can be accessible to all of our customers. For additional information, visit the Oracle Accessibility Program Web site at

http://www.oracle.com/accessibility/

Accessibility of Code Examples in Documentation

JAWS, a Windows screen reader, may not always correctly read the code examples in this document. The conventions for writing code require that closing braces should appear on an otherwise empty line; however, JAWS may not always read a line of text that consists solely of a bracket or brace.

Accessibility of Links to External Web Sites in Documentation

This documentation may contain links to Web sites of other companies or organizations that Oracle does not own or control. Oracle neither evaluates nor makes any representations regarding the accessibility of these Web sites.

Audience

Oracle Business Intelligence Concepts Guide is intended for information consumers, report creators, analysts, DBAs, and application developers who perform the following tasks:

• Use data analysis to help make business decisions

• Develop custom reports for their own use and to share with other users

• Administer Oracle Database for a business intelligence system

• Develop custom solutions for analyzing data stored in an Oracle database

To use this document, you need no prior experience with business intelligence software.

Structure

This document contains the following chapters:

Chapter 1, "Getting Started With Oracle Business Intelligence"

This chapter provides a general introduction to business intelligence, contains descriptions of Oracle Business Intelligence tools, and offers recommendations for their use.

Chapter 2, "How to Build a BI Solution"

This chapter provides sample scenarios for two different Oracle Business Intelligence solutions.

Glossary

The glossary contains definitions of the special terms used in this guide.

Related Documents

For more information, see these Oracle resources:

• Oracle Business Intelligence Installation Guide

• Oracle Business Intelligence Tools Installation Guide

• Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer Plus User's Guide

• Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer Publishing Workbooks in Oracle Application Server Portal

• Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer Viewer User's Guide

• Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer Administration Guide

• Oracle Warehouse Builder User's Guide

• Oracle Data Warehousing Guide

• Oracle Enterprise Manager Administrator's Guide

• Oracle OLAP Application Developer's Guide

• Oracle Business Intelligence Beans Help (in Oracle JDeveloper)

• Oracle Business Intelligence Spreadsheet Add-In Help (in Microsoft Excel)

The Oracle Technology Network (OTN) provides services and resources that developers, DBAs, and architects need to build, test, and deploy applications using Oracle products and industry-standard technologies. It provides them with free access to documentation, release notes, white papers, product announcements, and other vital information. The OTN Web site is at

http://www.oracle.com/technology/index.html

The OTN Web site for Business Intelligence is at

http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/index.html

Oracle By Example Series

The Oracle By Example (OBE) series provides hands-on, step-by-step instructions on how to implement various technology solutions to business problems. OBE contains numerous lessons on Business Intelligence from its Web site at

http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/start/bi.html

Following is a list of some of these lessons.

OracleBI Discoverer

 Discoverer lessons include:

• Creating Business Intelligence Reports Using OracleBI Discoverer Plus OLAP

• Analyzing Sales History Information using OracleBI Discoverer Plus Relational

• Viewing Sales History Information Using OracleBI Discoverer Viewer

OracleBI Spreadsheet Add-In

 Spreadsheet Add-In lessons include:

• Using the OracleBI Spreadsheet Add-In

BI Beans

 BI Beans lessons include:

• Develop Business Intelligence Applications Using OracleBI Beans

• Develop Business Intelligence Objects Using OracleBI Beans

Oracle Warehouse Builder

 Warehouse Builder lessons include:

• Using Oracle Warehouse Builder

Conventions

The following conventions are used in this manual: