By dylan.wan on August 14, 2007 12:21 PM
Why is the customer dimension so important?
- A well-maintained, well-deployed conforming customer dimension is the cornerstone of sound customer centric analysis
What are special characteristics of the customer dimension?
- Customer dimension is extremely deep. It may have million rows.
- Customer dimension is extremely wide. It has hundreds of attributes.
- Customer dimension changes often. It is not really a slowly
changing dimension. It is sometimes called as rapidly changing monster
dimension.
- Keeping the historical images of the customer data is important.
- The data in the customer dimension come from multiple sources.
Matching, de-dup, standardization among different sources is critical
for successfully conforming the dimension.
- The customer dimension with data may be enriched from the external data.
- Customer data is the source for other dimensions - geography, industry, lines of business, etc.
- You have to comply with the privacy regulation.
- The data from external source may be only licensed for a period of
time. The external data need to be associated with your own internal
data for analysis for special purposes and the data need to be removed
from your database.
- The customer dimension itself is actually a source of fact tables.
For example, # of customer living in California with the breakdown by
age groups.
By dylan.wan on August 16, 2007 6:12 PM
Oracle BI Server shipped the Oracle Merant ODBC Driver from DataDirect technology.
It does a license check so you may receive a warning when you connect to a non-Siebel database. I received the message when I tried to recalculate the row count in the Oracle BI Server Administration Tool for connecting to a non-Siebel database..
I just installed the Oracle ODBC Instant Client to solve this problem. It does not require Oracle Home and the installation is very simple. It took less then 10 minutes for downloading and installing the files.
I do not have a ORACLE_HOME in my machine since I am using the Oracle XE. The only problem I have found is that they are running different OC4J servers so I have multiple web server instance on my machines. Oracle Express takes the port 8080 as the default and the OC4J for analytics is running under the port 9704.
To run the Oracle BI Application, you don't need to install a separate application server. The OC4J server is packaged with the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition platform and you can put your web pages under X:OracleBIoc4j_bij2eehomedefault-web-app.
By dylan.wan on August 20, 2007 12:21 PM
Oracle BI Applications version 7.9.3 is now available on Oracle Technology Network for download. - Oracle Business Intelligence (10.1.3.X) download web site.
The technical note 676: Summary of Enhancements and New Features in Oracle Business Intelligence Applications Version 7.9.3 is available on supportweb.siebel.com.
