Changes in hardware technology always precede changes in software technology, and Oracle is no exception. As disk platter devices experience an unprecedented fall in cost, disk has become insanely cheap, with over a terabyte available for under $10,000.00. As a direct result of this hardware priced change, Oracle DBAs are being told to keep larger and larger amounts of historical data and to start providing management with tools to analyze and leverage this critical business information. This process is called Oracle business intelligence.
All Oracle databases collect information about ongoing business processes and it is only a matter of time before management starts to seek specialized information about their data. Eventually, all Oracle DBAs are faced with these requests for analysis of operational data, and these requests form the foundation of Oracle data warehousing and business intelligence.
As disk becomes insanely inexpensive, business managers are now choosing keep their operational data over years and use this valuable data to help them with basic Oracle business intelligence, the planning and execution of business analysis processes. Let’s take a quick look at the stages of this evolution into Oracle business intelligence:
- Data collection – This phase involved the ETL (Extract, test and Load) processes, taking operational data and saving it for analysis. The Oracle Data Warehouse Builder tool provides a framework for business intelligence, allowing for data extraction and loading of advanced data warehouse applications.
- Summary and aggregation – Managers start the business intelligence process by making requests for summaries and rollups of critical business metrics.
- Predictive analytics – At this stage, business intelligence requests become more sophisticated, and management will ask the DBA to extract historical data and make predictions using regression techniques.
- Hypothesis testing – As the managers begin to see the value of their data they will start requesting advanced business intelligence, full-blown modeling and the capability to perform hypothesis testing.
Sooner or later, all Oracle DBAs will be asked to perform business intelligence tasks and all Oracle professionals should become familiar with the common BI tools and techniques for Oracle business intelligence operations. See the link below for more details:
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Are you ready for Business Intelligence?
