Oracle Essentials, 4th Edition

Chapter 10. Oracle Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence

Although a database is general-purpose software, it provides a solution for a variety of technical requirements, including:

Recording and storing data

Reliably storing data and protecting each user’s data from the effects of other users’ changes

Reading data for online viewing and reports

Providing a consistent view of the data

Analyzing data

Summarizing data, detecting trends and data relationships, and forecasting

The last two solutions can be deployed as a data warehouse, part of an infrastructure that provides business intelligence used in strategic and tactical management of the corporation or organization. Such solutions expose valuable business information embedded in an organization’s data stores.

Data warehousing and business intelligence solutions are now widely deployed and new projects continue to be extremely popular. There is a very simple reason behind this trend: such projects are seen as core to the business and provide a return on investment that can be grasped by the business community.

The trend is not new. Oracle began adding data warehousing features to Oracle7 in the early 1990s. Additional features for warehousing and business intelligence appeared in subsequent releases, enabling better performance, functionality, scalability, and management. Oracle also offers tools for building and using a business intelligence infrastructure, including data movement and business analyses tools and applications. ...