Explaining OBIEE to Your Boss!

To explain all the details behind OBIEE would take a long time, probably bore a non-technical person half-way to death, yet still not provide them with any details they can conceptually grasp.

There is tons of documentation - the problem is wading through it all, and all your boss wants is-

"OBIEE in a Nutshell".

The OBIEE server exposes to an end user their business focussed measures and dimensions that can be used to assemble analyses of interest.

Assuming that your boss wants to find out how many cars were sold last month and whether they were new or used would assembling a theoretical query of:

"Calendar.Month", "Car.Condition", "Sales.UnitsSold"

with a filter of last month on "Calendar.Month"

The OBIEE server will now organise how the raw data sources are to be queried. It generates one, or more, queries against the data source(s). retreives the results, applies some post processing, and presents back to the user a result set that can be used to generate not only tables, but graphs, pivot tables and maps.

The OBIEE server has modelled physical raw data, applied calculations and transformations, all interwoven with a consistent security model, ensuring data access is seamless and controlled.

In discoverer or reports and to some extent in publisher you design a query. In OBIEE we no longer hand-craft individual queries, rather we model relationships and the ineractions between heirarchical behaviours. This allows for any possible random query entered by a user in the presentation layer to be transformed from a logical to a physical query, transparent to the user, and the results returned and displayed in the manner requested.