Business Intelligence Cookbook: A Project Lifecycle Approach Using Oracle Technology E-Book
John Heaton
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- Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
Oracle Database 11g is a comprehensive database platform for data warehousing and business intelligence that combines industry-leading scalability and performance, deeply-integrated analytics, and embedded integration and data-quality all in a single platform running on a reliable, low-cost grid infrastructure. This book steps through the lifecycle of building a data warehouse with key tips and techniques along the way.
Business Intelligence Cookbook: A Project Lifecycle Approach Using Oracle Technology outlines the key ways to effectively use Oracle technology to deliver your business intelligence solution. This is a practical guide starting with key recipes for project management then moving onto project delivery.
Business Intelligence Cookbook: A Project Lifecycle Approach Using Oracle Technology is a practical guide for performing key steps and functions on your project.
This book starts with setting the foundation for a highly repeatable efficient project management approach by assessing your current methodology to see how suitable it is for a business intelligence program. We also learn to set up the project delivery phases to consistently estimate the effort for a project. Along the way we learn to create blueprints for the business intelligence solution that help to connect and map out the destination of the solution. We then move on to analyze requirements, sources, and data. Finally we learn to secure the data as it is an important asset within the organization and needs to be secured efficiently and effectively.
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Seitenzahl: 277
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012
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Table of Contents
Business Intelligence Cookbook: A Project Lifecycle Approach Using Oracle Technology
Business Intelligence Cookbook: A Project Lifecycle Approach Using Oracle Technology
Copyright © 2012 Packt Publishing
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Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.
Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: July 2012
Production Reference: 1050712
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-84968-548-1
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Cover Image by Mark Holland ( <[email protected]> )
Credits
Author
John Heaton
Reviewers
Chandan Banerjee
Ajay Kalia
Toon Loonen
Clive Seymour
Michael Verzijl
Acquisition Editor
Rukshana Khambatta
Lead Technical Editor
Arun Nadar
Technical Editors
Merin Jose
Ameya Sawant
Copy Editor
Insiya Morbiwala
Project Coordinator
Joel Goveya
Proofreader
Aaron Nash
Indexer
Rekha Nair
Graphics
Valentina D'silva
Manu Joseph
Production Coordinator
Shantanu Zagade
Cover Work
Shantanu Zagade
About the Author
John Heaton graduated top of his class with a Diploma in Information Technology from Technikon Witwatersrand in South Africa (equivalent to a Bachelors degree in Computer Science), and worked for more than 10 years with Oracle Corporation, including as a Practice Manager. John had been co-running the North Business Intelligence and Warehouse Consulting practice, delivering business intelligence solutions to Fortune 500 clients. During this time, he steadily added business skills and business training to his technical background.
In 2005, John decided to leave Oracle and become a founding member in a small business, iSeerix. This allowed John to focus on strategic partnerships with clients to design and build business intelligence and data warehouse solutions.
John's strengths include the ability to communicate the benefits of introducing a business intelligence solution into a client's architecture. He has consistently become a trusted advisor to his clients. John's philosophy is based on responsibility and mutual respect. He relies on the unique abilities of individuals to ensure success in different areas, and strives to foster a teamed environment of creativity and achievement.
Today, John specializes as a Solution/Technical Architect, assisting customers in designing large, complex data warehouses. Through his years, John has worked in numerous industries with differing technologies. This broad experience base allows John to bring a unique perspective and understanding when designing and developing a data warehouse. His strong business background, coupled with technical expertise, and his certification in Project Management, make John a valued asset to any data warehouse project.
Acknowledgement
John would like to thank the following people who helped to contribute:
About the Reviewers
Chandan Banerjee is the Director and Principal Consultant at BA IT Consulting Pvt. Ltd. (www.baconsultinggroup.com), and also a Partner and Principal Consultant at Beetra Consulting ( www.beetraconsultancy.com).
He has more than 20 years of experience in leading and deploying IT solutions, out of which he has spent 18 years in the field of Business Intelligence (BI). He provides consulting services in BI Education, Data Integration, and Solution Architecture design. Managing deployments of common BI tools and applications is his forte. He is an expert in all the phases of lifecycle development for business intelligence projects. He has also been the architect of two BI-based, pre-built application products.
He has been one of the reviewers of "Oracle BI Publisher 11g: A Practical Guide to Enterprise Reporting".
Ajay Kalia, P.M.P., Director at iSeerix, is one of the co-founders of iSeerix, a software development company based in Pittsford, New York. Ajay has a BSc degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. He has 26 years of experience in the IT industry, focusing primarily on software development and on-site client consulting services. During his years in the industry, Ajay has established a successful track record delivering high-quality projects to numerous satisfied customers. This is indicative of his understanding of client IT requirements, and his ability to adapt, understand, and efficiently utilize the fast-changing technologies involved.
Toon Loonen, has specialized in Data Modeling (logical and physical) for OLTP and OLAP/DW/BI systems, Database Design, and Data Warehousing. He has broad experience with several databases, of which over 10 years is with Sybase, 10 years with Oracle/Oracle Spatial, and a few years with other relational databases (Informix, Mimer, MS SQL Server, and others).
An important part of Mr. Loonen's work is coaching junior colleagues, so they can take over his task on the projects, and he can move on to a new challenge.
After his study in Physics, Mr. Loonen joined Capgemini in 1975. He followed a technical path, from a programmer, tester, technical and functional designer, to data modeling and database designing. As an employee of Capgemini, he worked on projects for many organizations, both public and private, such as DHL, Philips, KPN, AHOLD, and many departments of the Dutch Government.
In the period between 1982-1985, he worked in Montreal, Canada, as a Manager of Software Quality Assurance for Philips, and as a Consultant for Coopers and Lybrand.
Mr. Loonen wrote a book on Data Modeling and Database Design, which covered the very start of this process (selection of the data domain), through conceptual, logical, and physical data modeling, up to the implementation in a database management product such as Oracle.
Mr. Loonen gave presentations on these topics, both within Capgemini as well as at international conferences. He has written many articles that are published on the Capgemini intranet, and 25 articles that are published in a Dutch magazine for DBAs—Database Magazine.
Clive Seymour has been implementing and using data warehouses for business intelligence and organisational performance management for more than 15 years. He advises organisations on business intelligence and information management strategies, governance, cultural change, solution and technical architecture, tool selections, and implementation options.
Clive has advised and worked for organisations in the financial services, mining, utilities, media, consumer goods, and manufacturing industries. He has led teams from small domestic to large multi-country international implementations, using Oracle's BI and IM capabilities and other leading vendor's solutions.
Michael Verzijl is a Business Intelligence Consultant, specialized in Oracle Business Intelligence, Oracle Data Warehousing, and Oracle GoldenGate.
Michael has a wide experience in the financial, utilities, and government industries, which include BI technologies such as Oracle, IBM Cognos, and SAP Business Objects.
Currently he is employed as a BI Consultant for Aorta Business Intelligence in the Netherlands, specializing in Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing.
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Preface
Business intelligence and data warehousing projects can be challenging and complex. Dealing with new technologies, processes, and different stakeholders presents an array of potential problems. To aid the project manager, there are recipes about project definition, scope, control, and risk management. Requirements, design, data analysis, security, and data enhancing will help in guiding the technical project member.
The Business Intelligence Cookbook: A Project Lifecycle Approach Using Oracle Technology book offers insight and real-world experience to assist you through the business intelligence and data warehouse lifecycle. Recipes from the first six chapters of this book, focus more on processes and practices to aid with the definition and management of the project. From Chapter 7, Architecture and Design onwards, this book provides more technical recipes for the business intelligence and data warehousing project.
What this book covers
Chapter 1, Defining a Program, assesses your current project delivery methodology to identify areas that may need enhancing to support your business intelligence initiative.
Chapter 2, Establishing the Project, reviews and enhances the project delivery phases in order to define a consistent set of work practices for the delivery of a successful project.
Chapter 3, Controlling the Project, focuses on communication and control, essential to a business intelligence project. Developing efficient and effective ways to do this is the key aim of this chapter.
Chapter 4, Wrapping Up the Project, focuses on business intelligence projects that continue for numerous iterations, understanding the information that needs to flow from project to project. Setting up ways to hand over that information is key to the long term success of the solution.
Chapter 5, The Blueprint, journeys a roadmap needed to guide one from the start to the destination, for a business intelligence and data warehouse solution.
Chapter 6, Analyzing the Requirements, talks of succinctly capturing and understanding the requirements of a project. Keeping requirements simple and providing transparency is key to demystifying the project for stakeholders.
Chapter 7, Architecture and Design, focuses on creating a successful foundation to interactively build your solution, which can save large amounts of time and money. Getting the basics right is the topic of this chapter.
Chapter 8, Analyzing the Sources, talks about identifying the right source with the most correct information, which is essential to the success of the project. Gaining a deeper understanding of your source systems will enable you to make intelligent decisions in determining which system contains the most accurate information for the subject area.
Chapter 9, Analyzing the Data, talks about how data profiling or data discovery can uncover a wealth of information. Identifying efficient ways and methods to interrogate information will unlock some of this wealth.
Chapter 10, Constructing the Data Model, talks about the Data Model, which is the key asset of the project. Understanding how to effectively design and develop this model enables organizations to reuse this asset many times.
Chapter 11, Defining the ETL/ELT, focuses on building an efficient framework and extraction, transformation, and loading routines, which leads to a simpler and easier-to-manage solution.
Chapter 12, Enhancing the Data, provides information about the data gaps normally existing within organizations. Once identified, effective means to capture and contribute information into the solution are required.
Chapter 13, Optimizing the Access, gives an insight into understanding the key technological capabilities within your reporting tool, allowing you to deliver information to your stakeholders in a meaningful and accurate way.
Chapter 14, Security, provides information on business intelligence and data warehouse solution security. This chapter focuses on showing you how to integrate common industrial security technology and requirements into your solution.
What you need for this book
This book covers the product suite from Oracle, to design and build a data warehouse. The softwares that are needed to support the recipes are as follows:
Additional products to support the project are as follows:
Who this book is for
If you are a project manager or IT professional looking to manage, design, and develop a data warehouse and business intelligence solution, then this is the best guide for you.
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Chapter 1. Defining a Program
The chapters in this book are intended to give you recipes aiding you in defining, starting, controlling, and wrapping up your Business Intelligence Initiative (BI Initiatives).
This chapter assesses your current project delivery methodology, and highlights areas which may need to be modified or enhanced to support your business intelligence program. In order to do this, you will be using the Project Readiness Worksheet, which is split into the following recipes:
Introduction
This chapter explores recipes designed to give you an insight into your BI Initiative.
BI Initiatives can be daunting, and seem complex to project managers or team members who have never been part of a Business Intelligence project before.
By analyzing a few key processes, understanding your organization and culture, adapting your methodology, and determining your project team, you can kick your BI Initiative off with the right start.
In order to facilitate this assessment, the project readiness worksheet will be used. The worksheet will ask a series of questions which you can complete, and at the end of each recipe give recommendations based on your responses. This worksheet will provide valuable insight into your organization.
Program or a project
Determining whether the BI Initiative is a program or a project can be very subjective. Labeling the initiative is not important, but rather understanding its characteristics better to structure your initiative.
Getting ready
Before starting the assessment, it is important to have some general information regarding your initiative, namely:
How to do it...
The most efficient way to understand your initiative and gather information, is to develop a questionnaire or survey. To do this, you could use any of the standard web tools available to build a survey or a simple spreadsheet.
How it works...
Based on the answers from the survey, you can determine whether you have a potential program or a project. A set of general definitions for a program and project are as follows:
BI Initiatives are normally focused on organizational improvements, or initiatives (regulatory and so on) of some description. These initiatives do not have a set duration, but rather are implemented using a system of measurement and feedback. As long as they attain the objectives (set measurements), they are normally continued.
Note
Determining whether a BI Initiative is a program or a project is an important part of the BI Initiative, because a key success factor is the way it influences the organization, and how the initiative morphs as the environment changes, ensuring long term benefits.
Each project within the BI Initiative should be focused on delivering unique benefits to the organization. These deliverables should be identified and sequenced to ensure that multiple projects or phases can run simultaneously. BI Initiatives are normally mapped to organizational or departmental goals, objectives, and metrics. These metrics are normally evolving and perpetual. The BI Initiative should include continued feedback and improvement to ensure that the program or project remains aligned with the business.
Multiple work packages, subject areas, or rollouts need to be analyzed before development, to understand how the deliverables of one project or phase have an impact on and contribute to subsequent projects or phases.
BI Initiatives rely on a good technical architecture, infrastructure, and integration to be successful. The integration points can easily become projects of their own, given the complexity and the deliverables. It is key to identify these projects early in the process and begin the key foundation infrastructure and integration early in the BI Initiative.
Subject areas can be prioritized and delivered based on costs. Tracking costs and estimates by subject area delivers valuable information to the project. It is important to agree upon and build a standard estimation model to cost a subject area; use a similar means to track expenditure and completion. It is best to start this from the beginning, else trying to manage and reconcile this information after the fact can be cumbersome and time consuming.
Global or multi-site rollouts require you to understand the type of architecture you are putting in place, and the support mechanism for this. Deploying development tools across large networks or geographic locations will have an impact on schedules as you cannot be as efficient. Additional techniques such as remote desktops or access are required for remote locations. Additional support teams or shifts may be necessary to support multi-site implementations. Both of these will affect cost and schedule, and are commonly forgotten within BI Initiatives.
Multi-language requirements not only affect the technical solution but also the business solution. Translating information is costly and time consuming. These factors need to be incorporated into the overall program.
