Agents, KPI, Scorecards, Writeback, OCI and ODBC

     Agents:

ü  Agents deliver targeted analytics to users based on a combination of schedule and trigger event. Delivery can be by a variety of routes, for example to Dashboard Alerts or to email.

ü  Agents enable you to automate your business processes.

ü  You can use them to provide event-driven alerting, scheduled content publishing, and conditional event-driven action execution.

ü  You can choose:

1.      A schedule that the Agent runs on

2.      A data condition that determines what the Agent does

3.      An analysis that can be distributed

4.      Actions that can be automatically executed depending on whether the data condition is met

ü  Agents can dynamically detect information-based problems and opportunities, determine the appropriate individuals to notify, and deliver information to them through a wide range of devices (email, phones, and so on).

KPI and Scorecards:

KPI:

      A KPI is a measurement of a particular business process which is compared against specific goals and objectives of an organization. KPI’s are typically tracked over time as a way to monitor performance and drive business decisions to help improve upon that performance. KPI does typically have both a goal and a status that reflects performance relative to the goal.

      KPI in OBIEE 11g can be used an analysis dashboard to allow a user to view KPI performance and drill into the details to understand why a KPI value may be off target. KPI’s can also be used to automatically trigger alerts to specific users using OBIEE’s agent mechanism when KPI target values reach critical status levels.

      OBIEE KPI’s also can be configured with another new feature – Action Links – which allow the user to initiate a action based on the status of the KPI. The action link can reference another analysis, send an email, kick off a workflow, or any other process to assist in making the KPI the basis for “actionable intelligence”.

Scorecards:

      Scorecards help organizations define overall goals to improve corporate profitability or increase customer satisfaction, for example and break those goals down into a series of objectives that will enable them to meet the goals. Each of these objectives and initiatives is associated with one or more of an organization’s KPIs, so progress toward each objective can be measured.

Fragmentation in OBIEE:

ü  We use fragmentation when we have fact or dimensional data in one or more different tables or data is split in different data sources. Then each logical table source represents one data segment.

ü  You can split the query against a table or another. Very often, the table is fragmented according to the most important dimension in a star schema the time dimension.
For example, clients, in the first table are clients from A to M, in the second from M to Z.

ü  You have three sort of fragmentation:

§  Fact-based / Dimension-based fragmentation

§  Content-based / Value-based fragmentation

§  Level-based fragmentation / aggregate navigation

Write back:

ü  It provides users of a dashboard page or an analysis with the ability to modify the data that they see in the table view. 

ü  It is the ability in OBIEE to allow the user to enter a value or values directly into a report and have those values written into the database.

ü  Values are written back to an actual physical table in the database.

ü  Only if the user has the “Write back to database privilege”, then the write back fields in the reports will editable.

Difference between OCI and ODBC:

ODBC: Open Database Connectivity, which is known as Universal Data Connector.

Accessing data in a heterogeneous environment of relational and non- relational database management systems. 

Accessing data in a heterogeneous environment of relational and non- relational database management systems. 

OCI: Oracle Call Interface Normally connects to Oracle Source. Hence, both can connect to Oracle Sources.

Oracle Call Interface (OCI) is an application programming interface (API) that lets you creates applications that use function calls to access an Oracle database and control all phases of SQL statement execution. OCI supports the data types, calling conventions, syntax, and semantics of C and C++.