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.
A business intelligence infrastructure can enable business analysts to determine:
??? How a business scenario compares to past business results
??? New solutions by looking at the data differently
Business Intelligence Basics | 223
??? What could happen in the future
??? How business actions could be changed to impact the future
This chapter introduces the basic concepts, technologies, and tools used in data
warehousing and business intelligence. To help you understand how Oracle
addresses infrastructure and analyses issues, we??™ll first describe some of the basic
terms and technologies.
Business Intelligence Basics
Why build a data warehouse or business intelligence solution? Why is the data in an
online transaction processing (OLTP) database part of only a business intelligence
solution? Data warehouses are often designed with the following in mind:
Strategic and tactical analyses can discern trends in data
Data warehouses often are used in creation of simple reports based on aggregate
values culled from enormous amounts of data.
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