Oracle® Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Solutions

Chapter 1. Oracle Business Intelligence

Business intelligence can be defined as having the right access to the right data or information needed to make the right business decisions at the right time. The data might be raw or might have been analyzed in some way. Having access to such information enables management of the business by fact instead of by primarily relying on intuition.

This is a broad definition of business intelligence and is not limited to data warehousing alone. Although a data warehouse is often used to provide such a solution and is the primary focus of most of this book, we'll broaden the discussion to also include business intelligence gained from on-line transaction processing solutions. Business analysts and users of business intelligence don't really care about — or want to understand where their information comes from. They simply want access to such sources. So the solution you choose to deploy will depend on the kind of information that is needed.

This chapter provides a broad discussion of Oracle's business intelligence offerings and should help you better understand all of the solution types available for deployment. We conclude this chapter by discussing some of the emerging business needs that will lead to a further blending of data warehousing and transactional systems. In subsequent chapters in this section of the book, we provide more details as to how and why you'd deploy transactional business intelligence and data warehousing solutions. We also ...