Description
Oracle Business Analytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle
Engineered Systems
An Oracle White Paper
March 2013
Oracle Business Analytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle
Engineered Systems
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
Disclaimer
The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes
only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or
functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and
timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of
Oracle.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
Executive Overview ............................................................................................. 2
Introduction ......................................................................................................... 2
Why Analytic Applications? The Business Problem ............................................. 3
Traditional Build-Your-Own Business Analytics Systems Impose Constraints . 4
New Demands for Analytic Applications .......................................................... 4
The Solution: Oracle Analytic Applications with Engineered Systems ................. 6
Oracle BI Applications – Packaged Analytic Applications ................................ 6
Oracle BI Applications – Available Modules That All Work Together................ 8
Benefits of Oracle BI Applications .................................................................. 10
Oracle BI Foundation – Enterprise-Class Business Intelligence Platform ...... 10
Introduction to Engineered Systems .............................................................. 11
Oracle BI Applications Work Better with Engineered Systems ........................... 15
Business Benefits of Oracle BI Applications on Exalytics and Exadata .......... 15
Technical Benefits of Oracle BI Applications on Exalytics and Exadata ......... 20
Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 22
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
2
Executive Overview
Business Analytics systems are required to get fact-based insight to compete effectively, and
user expectations are escalating rapidly. Pre-built analytic applications, delivered quickly and
cost-effectively with in-memory performance and enterprise scale are necessary. This white
paper examines the advantages of pre-built analytic applications for a broad range of business
processes, delivered on optimized Oracle Engineered Systems, and how they can be the
cornerstone of a vibrant, growing analytic capability that will pay ongoing dividends.
Introduction
Ask anyone in the industry. Business analytics is a hot topic, and the business press is full of
examples of leading organizations competing better through analytics. In fact, a study by
researchers at MIT and Wharton finds that “firms that adopt data-driven decision making have
output and productivity that is 5-6% higher than the competition.”
1
Extracting meaningful, actionable insight from corporate business systems is not option—it is a
requirement in order to compete effectively. Those organizations that adopt a data-driven
decision making culture are those best enabled to compete.
As the #1 vendor in Business Analytics, with the industry’s most complete and integrated
range of enterprise analytic solutions, Oracle helps organizations to grow an analytic culture to
• Increase efficiency, by continuously monitoring and quickly reacting to correct or improve
established business processes, and to do that by simplifying IT and managing risk,
• Enhance effectiveness, by identifying what to do more and what to do less, and
• Be transformational, by unleashing the creativity and power of everyone to create new
levels of differentiation to enable superior performance.
1
Brynjolfsson, Erik, Hitt, Lorin M. and Kim, Heekyung Hellen, “Strength in Numbers: How Does Data-
Driven Decisionmaking Affect Firm Performance?, ” April 22, 2011.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
3
An analytic culture requires people, and the trends are clear for user expectations of Business
Analytics: faster delivery of analytic applications, simple to use but enabling sophisticated
analysis, interactive self-service exploration with fast performance, and available anytime,
anywhere. This “Consumerization of BI” trend places increasing user expectations on
Business Analytics systems, demanding that analytical insights are instantly accessible,
visually compelling, delivered on mobile devices, all with responsive performance.
This white paper examines the difficulties companies face meeting the escalating expectations
of analytic applications, it introduces Oracle BI Applications, the Oracle BI Foundation Suite,
and Oracle Engineered Systems, and concludes with advantages of running BI Applications on
Engineered Systems.
Why Analytic Applications? The Business Problem
Today, companies realize that the information locked in enterprise and legacy systems is incredibly
valuable. Being able to analyze this information, combined with other corporate data sources is
essential to drive the business forward based on facts, rather than intuition. Although most
organizations have been investing on reporting, query tools and data warehouses for a long time, fewer
than 30% of candidate business people use BI systems they have.
2
Why so low?
First, it’s hard to build these systems and it requires specialized
skills. It’s hard to build analytic applications, to integrate
necessary technologies, to extract data from ERP and other
enterprise system, to conform and model the data, to define best
practice business metrics and Key Performance Indicators
(KPIs), and to make all that compelling and easily usable by a
range of business users. And those are just the basics.
Second, users are bringing whole new sets of expectations to
analytics around relevance, ease of use, and responsiveness.
2
James Richardson, Gartner, “The Consumerization of BI Drives Greater Adoption,” ID Number:
G00212776 , June 3, 2011.
Acronyms Defined
BI =Business Intelligence
CRM =Customer Relations Management
ERP =Enterprise Performance Management
ETL =Extraction Transformation Load
HCM =Human Capital Management
KPI =Key Performance Indicator
SCM =Supply Chain Management
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
4
Traditional Build-Your-Own Business Analytics Systems Impose Constraints
Traditionally, analytic applications have been a build-your-own affair, with each company
independently colleting requirements, extracting data, combining that data in a data warehouse, and
then providing users query and reporting tools to build their own analyses.
• It is difficult for business users to voice their requirements for analytics. They don’t know what is
possible or what peer businesses are doing. Requests for requirements are often answered with
“don’t know” or “give me everything.”
• Extracting data from complex transactional schemas of ERP, CRM, HCM SCM and other enterprise
applications, consolidating and integrating data from heterogeneous systems and applications, and
reconciling and validating data quality are all specialized skills and the work takes time. Skilled data
architects, data warehouse designers and ETL programmers are needed to build from scratch.
• Often a selection of tools and technologies need to be integrated in order to fulfill the range of
analytics needs.
• As data sizes and user volumes increase, ongoing administration and performance tuning is needed,
else the system can get bogged down.
New Demands for Analytic Applications
Business users have higher expectations than ever before, as they experience the “Google effect” of
searches being returned instantaneously, and consumer devices like the iPhone, which are easy to use
and optimized for particular functions. Based on the experience of thousands of analytics
implementations, both custom-built and using prebuilt analytic applications, the following
requirements emerge:
These expectations include:
• Integrate diverse corporate sources of information into an enterprise view. The reality for
almost all organizations is relevant data is stored in fragmented sources. Analytics on a particular
silo of information is useful, but creating a consolidated enterprise-wide view is much more
beneficial. With the consistency of an enterprise data model, business can perform analysis across
subject areas, enabling, for instance, a company to detect customer satisfaction problems are tied to
delayed shipments, which are in turn caused by slow accounts payable to critical vendors.
• Trusted metrics, following industry best practices. Monitoring metrics and Key Performance
Indicators (KPIs) is the lifeblood of performance management. A palette of pre-defined industry
best practices metrics, built off curated, trustworthy data sources, and presented in understandable,
easy to navigate dashboards is a base requirement. And, businesses need to be able to configure
these as necessary for their specific organizations.
• Clean, clear dashboards and reports, designed for instant understandability. A single metric
or KPI is no use without context. How does the number compare with this period last year? How
has market share shifted over time? What is the trend in on-time shipments? These typical business
questions can require complex calculations, well-designed dashboard layout, context, and guided
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
5
analysis paths. This level of design is typically beyond the skills of most users and, even, most IT
professionals.
• Rich data visualization including location-based, geospatial views. In order to gain the best
understanding of the data being analyzed, and for people to engage their right brains, appropriate
visualizations are needed.
• Interactive, self-service exploration. Once a problem is detected, business users want to “drill
down” and perform additional analysis to uncover root cause problems. They may want also to
specialize an existing report or dashboard, or to create their own analysis to reuse and share.
• Model outcomes and run what-if scenarios. After a problem is detected and diagnosed, then
what? Businesses want to model what actions to take through scenario modeling, to answer
questions like “What if I reorganized sales territories and comp plans? Which choices would lead to
the best outcomes?”
• See what’s happening now and what is likely to happen in the future. As companies mature
in their analytic capabilities, they desire to move beyond analyzing history—too late to affect the
business results—and react in near-real time. As sophistication rises, they want to employ advanced
predictive analytics to see what’s likely to happen. Advanced analytics like data mining and statistical
techniques can project what is likely to happen in the future.
• Mobile, anytime, anywhere. Gartner estimates that 33% of BI content in 2013
3
will be consumed
by mobile devices. There is no doubt that demand for mobile intelligence is exploding. Today’s
mobile workforce demands access to the information they need, wherever they are, securely with no
additional development or compromise in functionality or form factor.
• Combine structured with unstructured data and Big Data. While analytics predominantly are
used for structured, tabular data, there can be great business advantage to involve unstructured data
that might include verbatim text in ERP or CRM systems, external social media feeds like Twitter
and Facebook, or to access unstructured information stored in Hadoop.
• Integrated technology and analysis tools. Different users have different levels of analytic
inclination and skills. Some want merely to consume pre-built analysis, and others want to develop
what-if models, predictive models, or analytic applications for others to consume. Organizations’
analytic needs mature and broaden over time. Therefore, a range of analytic capabilities is needed,
but in many instances, the customer’s IT department is left to integrate all the necessary
technologies. Pre-integrated BI technology with a broad range of functionality for today’s and
tomorrow’s requirements is preferable.
3
Tapadinhas, Joao. "Critical Capabilities for Mobile BI." Gartner, Inc., ID Number: G00224286,
10 Apr. 2012.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
6
This is a challenging list that requires a variety of skills and technologies. Thus, it is hard and expensive
for organizations to tackle these items on their own, or just by hiring IT consultants.
The Solution: Oracle Analytic Applications with Engineered
Systems
Prebuilt analytic applications, delivered on a complete and integrated BI technology foundation, and
running in optimized Engineered Systems are the way to go. This combination assures the easiest,
most risk free implementation, is proven to deliver strong business value, delivers speed-of-thought
performance and massive scale, and is aligned with Oracle technology and applications strategies, while
remaining open to work with each customer’s individual IT environment.
Oracle BI Applications – Packaged Analytic Applications
Although every organization has some unique reporting and analysis needs that require custom
applications, many requirements can be addressed through packaged analytic applications. The basic
analytic requirements of common functional groups such as finance, human resources (HR), sales, and
procurement are similar among organizations or industries. For example, finance departments in nearly
all private and public sector organizations must continuously measure and monitor trends and
variances of their general ledger accounts, accounts receivables, accounts payables, and fixed assets.
With Oracle Business Intelligence Applications:
• Finance professionals have visibility into cash flow, gross margins, operating expenses, account
balances, and business unit profitability.
• HR professionals can gain insights into headcount trends, employee attrition rates, and the
effectiveness of training programs.
• Procurement and supply chain professionals can track parts and material trends, supplier
performance, trade discounts, and warranty return costs.
• Marketing professionals can monitor the efficacy of promotions and campaigns and make
adjustments that maximize success rates.
• Sales professionals can more effectively forecast revenues and transactions, manage the pipeline,
and track key opportunities.
• Service managers can optimize call center and depot staffing levels, identify problem areas that
need attention, and respond more effectively to customer service calls.
• Executives can get cross-enterprise views of their businesses, incorporating metrics and KPIs from
all the available BI Applications content.
Oracle BI Applications are complete, pre-built BI solutions that help people at all levels of an
organization better understand how their business is performing. Because these applications are pre-
built and pre-integrated with the leading transactional applications, they are far quicker to implement
and deliver value with much lower risk. Once in place enable better decisions, confident action, and
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
7
more efficient business processes, often in just weeks. Oracle BI Applications provide a single,
integrated view of enterprise information, enabling greater insight and alignment across business
functions.
Each BI Application includes:
• Pre-integration with Oracle Applications JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, PeopleSoft, Siebel, E-
Business Suite, and/or Fusion applications. The BI applications understand the source schemas of
business applications and provide prebuilt logic to extract data from sources systems, and then
transform and load into a data warehouse data model
• A best practices enterprise analytic data model consisting of star schemas with conformed
dimensions. This means that a customer is a customer is a customer across all the family of BI
Applications, and if several are installed together, analysis can be expanded across subject areas for
an end-to-end view of corporate performance. All the major entities are covered, including
Customers, Employees, Suppliers, Projects, Orders, GL entries, and many more.
• The ability to work with multiple and disparate data sources. Oftentimes companies might have
a CRM instance for Europe, one for the Americas, and another one for Asia Pacific. BI
Applications can combine these instances. As well, BI Applications can integrate data from
heterogeneous systems. For example, a company might have Siebel CRM, PeopleSoft HCM, and E-
Business Suite Financials.
• Open access to all data sources. The metadata-driven design of BI Applications allows
implementers to integrate data sources for which Oracle doesn’t offer pre-built adapters.
• Role-based reports and dashboards for all levels of employees in most departments. Dashboards
include guided navigations, to enable casual users to find the insights they need.
• Security integration to Oracle applications, enabling leverage of roles, profiles, and security set-
ups defined in transactional applications.
• Thousands of pre-defined metrics and calculations across the suite of BI Applications. This
provides a palette of metrics to choose from, which is much easier than collecting user requirements.
If the predefined calculation of a metric doesn’t fit your business, it can easily be modified, from
which point all affected dashboards and reports are automatically updated.
• Anytime, Anywhere Mobile access. The BI Applications are ready to deploy on iPad tablets with
no further development.
With so much pre-built content, implementing Oracle BI Applications is an exercise in configuring and
editing, rather than building from scratch. This has proven many times to deliver enterprise-grade
analytics into production often in 6, 10, or 12 weeks, in contrast to year or longer enterprise data
warehouse builds. See Figure 1.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
8
Figure 1. Using Oracle BI Applications significantly reduces the time to implement and deploy,
resulting in faster time to value and lower risk. BI Applications often can be deployed into
production in a matter of weeks, rather than half a year, a year, or more, for custom-built solutions.
In addition to rapid time to value, BI Applications embody analytic best practices—in the design of
ETL, the data warehouse data model, metrics and KPIs, and dashboard design. In practice, it would
be hard for an individual company to craft such as solution on its own.
Oracle BI Applications – Available Modules That All Work Together
Table 1 lists the core Oracle BI Applications.
TABLE 1. ORACLE BI APPLICATIONS
APPLICATION DESCRIPTION
ERP Anal ytics
Financi al
Anal yti cs
Oracle Financial Analytics provides organizations detailed analysis into the factors that drive revenues,
costs, and shareholder value. It helps front-line and financial managers improve financial performance with
complete, up-to-the-minute information on their departments' expenses and revenue contributions, cash
flow, and profitability, while maintaining more accurate, timely, and transparent financial reporting that helps
ensure Sarbanes-Oxley compliance
HR Anal ytics Oracle Human Resources Analytics provides organizations detailed analysis on HR programs and
workforce performance. HR staff, business executives, and front-line managers have access to the critical
workforce information required to analyze workforce staffing and productivity, and to better design
compensation that rewards performance.
Procurement
and Spend
Anal yti cs
Oracle Procurement & Spend Analytics helps organizations optimize their supply side performance by
integrating data from across the enterprise value chain. Organizations benefit from increased visibility into
Corporate Spend and complete source-to-pay process, including comprehensive sourcing and procurement
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
9
analysis, supplier performance analysis, supplier payables analysis, and Employee Expenses.
Suppl y Chai n
and Order
Management
Anal yti cs
Oracle Supply Chain and Order Management Analytics delivers deep customer insight into sales orders and
inventory data that empowers organizations to make better decisions in each stage of the supply chain
management lifecycle. Organizations are able to assess inventory levels, likely product fulfillment needs,
quickly identify potential order backlog issues, and stay on top of critical A/R and DSO issues.
Project
Anal yti cs
Oracle Project Analytics provides out-of-the-box, role-based dashboards that enable project managers,
executives, and accountants to monitor projects and control the risks that lead to budget and schedule
overruns. It enables robust analysis of important project-based forecast, budgets, cost, revenue, billing,
commitments, cross-charges, profitability, resource management and sub ledger to general ledger
reconciliation.
Student
Information
Anal yti cs
Oracle Student Information Analytics helps academic institutions effectively manage student information,
improve operations, and achieve institutional excellence. It provides an integrated view of admissions and
recruiting, student records and student financials, enabling organizations to maximize student recruiting
efforts, shorten time-to-graduation, improve retention rates, identify successful and unsuccessful courses
and programs, and analyze faculty workloads
Manufacturing
Anal yti cs
Oracle Manufacturing Analytics helps manufacturing organizations optimize their supply networks by
integrating data from across the enterprise value chain. Through complete end-to-end insight into the
manufacturing operations and visibility across the plants and business units, organizations can significantly
reduce costs; enhance profitability, increase customer satisfaction, and gain competitive advantage.
Enterprise
Asset
Management
Anal yti cs
Oracle Enterprise Asset Management Analytics provides visibility to enterprise-wide
maintenance information. With pre-built reports covering Maintenance History, Maintenance Cost Analysis
and Maintenance Work Orders, Oracle Enterprise Asset Management Analytics enables Maintenance
Managers to maximize performance and opportunities, identify potential issues much in advance,
and address them before they escalate into serious problems.
CRM Anal ytics
Marketi ng
Anal yti cs
Oracle Marketing Analytics allows your organization to obtain maximum results from your marketing
investments by providing your entire marketing team with a complete, up-to-the-minute picture of customer
preferences, buying behavior, and profitability. Oracle Marketing Analytics helps you to develop closer, more
valuable customer and prospect relationships and improve marketing effectiveness.
Sales
Anal yti cs
Oracle Sales Analytics provides hundreds of key performance indicators to improve the effectiveness of
your sales people by providing real-time, actionable insight into every sales opportunity at the point of
customer contact. With more accurate sales forecasts and enhanced identification of potential problems and
opportunities, Oracle Sales Analytics helps close business faster and increase overall sales revenue.
Price
Anal yti cs
Oracle Price Analytics enables users to make insight-driven pricing decisions, to measure pricing
effectiveness and to take improvement actions, informed by consistent data and the right business context.
Users are armed with visibility into a single consolidated view of profitability and simple-but-sophisticated
analytic tools and alerts.
Service
Anal yti cs
Oracle Service Analytics provides organizations with a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of customer
service effectiveness. It enables companies to take targeted actions to improve productivity of Service
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
10
centers, reduce costs, and increase customer satisfaction.
Contact
Center
Anal yti cs
Oracle Contact Center Telephony Analytics provides organizations with powerful insight that enables them
to analyze all aspects of contact center performance. The solution provides best-practice metrics, alerts,
and key performance indicators (KPIs), enabling companies to take targeted action to improve employee
productivity, reduce costs, and increase customer satisfaction.
Loyal ty
Anal yti cs
Oracle Loyalty Analytics is a comprehensive analytic solution that provides new levels of information
richness, usability and reach to all employees engaged in the loyalty program lifecycle. This results in faster
and more informed decisions that help the loyalty organization optimize its programs to drive member
behavior, build value and reduce costs.
Benefits of Oracle BI Applications
Oracle BI Applications provide benefits in three key areas: deeper business insight, improved
alignment, and greater leverage.
• Insight. Oracle BI Applications enable users to gain visibility and insight into business
performance, processes, and customers. As a result they enable better decisions, actions and control
at all levels. People can respond faster to opportunities and threats, and can identify and replicate
best practices.
• Alignment. People in all roles gain a single, consistent view of enterprise information across
functions and data sources. They are able to align strategy and execution across functions, and can
use guided analytics and best practice analytic workflows to drive the most profitable or efficient
actions.
• Leverage. Oracle BI Applications let people do more with less – to deploy BI more broadly across
the organization with fewer IT resources than custom-built solutions. Oracle BI Applications
accelerate time-to-value, lower TCO and risk, and increase the value of existing data and applications
including CRM and ERP systems.
Oracle BI Foundation – Enterprise-Class Business Intelligence Platform
Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite—recognized as a category leader by all of the major
industry analyst research firms—represents the underlying BI technology for all of Oracle’s packaged
analytic applications, as well as business applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite; Oracle’s
PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel solutions; Oracle Fusion Applications; and Oracle’s industry
applications.
BI Foundation is a comprehensive architecture, which features best-in-class technology for reporting,
analysis, and performance management applications. Based on an integrated, scalable, web-native
architecture, Oracle’s unified and open BI Foundation reduces cost of ownership, efficiently accesses
information from heterogeneous sources, and provides an enterprise semantic layer with multiple
channels of information delivery to support self-service, pervasive BI.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
11
Introduction to Engineered Systems
Oracle’s engineered systems combine best-of-breed hardware and software components with game-
changing technical innovations. Designed, engineered, and tested to work best together, Oracle’s
engineered systems can power the cloud or streamline data center operations to make traditional
deployments even more efficient. The components of Oracle’s engineered systems are preassembled
for targeted functionality and then—as a complete system—optimized for extreme performance. By
taking the guesswork out of these highly available, purpose-built solutions, Oracle delivers a solution
that is integrated across every layer of the technology stack—a simplicity that translates into less risk
and lower costs for your business. Only Oracle can innovate and optimize at every layer of the stack to
simplify data center operations, drive down costs, and accelerate business innovation.
Oracle Exalogic
Oracle Exalogic is an Engineered System on which enterprises deploy Oracle business applications,
Oracle Fusion Middleware or third-party software products. Exalogic comes pre-built with compute
nodes, memory, flash storage and centralized storage, all connected using InfiniBand in a high
redundancy architecture delivering five-nines availability, with fault tolerance and zero-down-time
maintenance.
Exalogic dramatically improves performance of Oracle Applications, Fusion Middleware and 3rd party
applications without requiring code changes and reduces costs across the application lifecycle, from
initial set-up to on-going maintenance, as compared to conventional hardware platforms. Oracle has
made unique optimizations and enhancements in Exalogic firmware, Exalogic software, and in Oracle’s
middleware and Oracles applications. These include on-chip network virtualization based on near zero
latency Infiniband fabric, high-performance Remote Direct Memory Access, workload management in
Oracle Weblogic server and optimizations in Oracle Coherence and Oracle Traffic Director. Exalogic
includes support for a highly optimized version of the Oracle VM, which significantly outperforms
comparable virtualization solutions and is an ideal consolidation platform for Oracle Applications.
Templates to simplify install, deployment and configuration of Applications on Exalogic are available.
What specific technical benefits does Exalogic deliver?
Applications using WebLogic benefit from a number of optimizations for thread efficiency, faster
interprocess communication and higher message throughput. An optimized work scheduler for
Exalogic balances the number of threads per core available on Exalogic systems, providing better
application processing efficiency. WebLogic Server has changed to use shared byte buffers instead of
array copies when passing data, improving application interprocess communication performance and a
66% reduction in number of objects created. This reduces heap usage and results in fewer expensive
garbage collections for Applications. WebLogic also optimizes socket calls to reduce lock contention
on Exalogic, allowing fewer threads to process a larger number of message requests.
Exalogic Oracle VM can be used to sub-divide a physical compute node into multiple virtual machines
to increase application deployment efficiency while maintaining application performance. Oracle VM
has been engineered for tight integration with Exalogic Exabus I/O backplane using a technique called
Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) ensuring Oracle VM significantly outperforms comparable
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
12
hypervisors from other leading vendors. The benefit of this approach is unmatched application
performance. In an Exalogic configuration, the impact of virtualization on application throughput and
latency is negligible.
Applications running on Exalogic utilize Exabus, the underlying Infiniband fabric, which provides low
latency and high throughput eliminating I/O bottlenecks in every application layer. Applications
components are typically deployed in more than one server and Exabus provides low latency for I/O
across nodes on same Exalogic rack. Access to ZFS storage device over Exabus greatly reduces latency
for log file writes and other file access operations. For applications running on Exalogic and accessing
database tier on Exadata, Exabus delivers faster I/O, reduces CPU usage on both the mid-tier and DB-
tier and provides higher connection pooling efficiency.
Oracle Exadata Database Machine
Oracle’s Exadata Database Machine is Oracle’s database platform delivering extreme performance for
database applications including Online Transaction Processing, Data Warehousing, Reporting, Batch
Processing, or Consolidation of mixed database workloads. Exadata is a pre-configured, pre-tuned, and
pre-tested integrated system of servers, networking and storage all optimized around the Oracle
database. Because Exadata is an integrated system, it offers superior price-performance, availability and
supportability. Exadata frees users from the need to build, test and maintain systems and allows them
to focus on higher value business problems.
Exadata uses a scale out architecture for database servers and storage. This architecture maintains an
optimal storage hierarchy from memory to flash to disk. Smart Scan query offload has been added to
the storage cells to offload database processing. Exadata implements Smart Flash Cache as part of the
storage hierarchy. Exadata software determines how and when to use the Flash storage for reads and
write as well as how best to incorporate Flash into the database as part of a coordinated data caching
strategy. A high-bandwidth low-latency InfiniBand network running specialized database networking
protocols connects all the components inside an Exadata Database Machine. In addition to a high
performance architecture and design, Exadata offers the industry’s best data compression to provide a
dramatic reduction in storage needs.
What specific technical benefits does Exadata deliver?
Exadata Smart Flash Cache uses Flash memory to dramatically reduce the time to read and write
database and log records. The intelligence in Smart Flash Cache transparently moves active database
blocks from disk to flash in real time, thus ensuring that "hot" data is in Flash memory when the next
access occurs. Blocks that should not be in Flash are similarly recognized; thus maximizing the amount
of space in Flash for active data.
Exadata Smart Scan speeds up data-intensive queries by leveraging the processing power of Exadata
Storage Servers to scan and filter out results. By moving queries to storage instead of moving the data
to the database servers, long-running reports and queries often complete 10x faster than on
conventional systems.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
13
The use of InfiniBand as the networking fabric within Exadata ensures the lowest latency for messages
and the highest bandwidth for data transfers. High-speed transactions as well as data-intensive queries
and reports reap the benefits.
Exadata Scale-Out Storage enables the full performance of Exadata to be realized against large and
growing databases, without fear of bottlenecks. As the database size grows and storage capacity is
added to Exadata, storage performance and networking bandwidth scale in equal proportion.
IORM allocates I/O bandwidth across different applications and databases, based on a prioritized
allocation plan, to ensure that the most important applications get the performance they need when
they need it.
Hybrid Columnar Compression dramatically reduces the storage space consumed by the database,
while at the same time speeding up queries against the compressed data through reduced I/O.
Compression often reduces the data storage by a factor of 10x or more, storing a petabyte scale
database in 100TB of disk. Since compressed tables remain compressed in Flash memory as well as on
disk, very large databases often fit entirely in Flash memory when compressed.
Oracle Exal ytics
As analytic applications become more sophisticated and calculation-intensive, the use of mobile BI
expands, user adoption increases, and data volumes explode making the need for speed and efficiency
more important than ever. In-memory technology can dramatically accelerate analytic performance.
Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine is the industry’s first engineered system for analytics that
combines market leading BI Foundation, in-memory analytics software, and best-in class hardware
engineered and optimized to work together to deliver extreme performance for Business Intelligence
and Enterprise Performance Management applications. As a result, users can visually navigate and drill
into information at the speed of thought, without limits on the complexity of their questions or the
volume of the underlying data. Exalytics drives a new class of smarter and more powerful analytic
applications that simply weren’t possible using conventional BI software and generic hardware
configurations.
Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite running on Oracle Exalytics has been specially enhanced
to take advantage of large memory, processors, concurrency, storage, networking, operating system,
kernel, and system configuration afforded by the Oracle Exalytics hardware. Oracle TimesTen for
Exalytics has been specially enhanced for analytical processing at in-memory speeds. With lightening
fast scan speed of up to 100 million rows/second and up to 10x columnar compression, TimesTen for
in-memory analytics delivers faster reports & dashboards for departmental as well as enterprise wide
consumption.
What is technically unique about Exalytics?
Exalytics is custom designed for In-memory Analytics. It packs at least a Terabyte of high speed
memory and matches the memory backed by several terabytes of high-speed PCI-Flash that can
support hundreds of thousands of IOPS per second as well as gigabytes of bandwidth per second. This
flash layer is further backed by several terabytes of persistent hard disk storage. Exalytics also includes
FibreChannel interfaces to further expand storage capacity.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
14
In addition to memory and storage, Exalytics includes the best server processors in the market with at
least 40 compute cores with several execution threads per core. Exalytics also provides numerous high
speed networking options including 10Gbps and 1Gbps Ethernet. However specifically for Exadata
connectivity, Exalytics also includes two 40Gbps InfiniBand interfaces and cables to ensure
unparalleled latency and throughput between Exalytics and Exadata.
Exalytics software components have been optimized tightly to match the hardware – all the way to
specific hardware parts, their firmware, drivers and the operating system – a customized Oracle
Enterprise Linux release with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. These low level optimizations have
shown 3X better scalability and performance on benchmarks compared to similarly configured
commodity servers. Some of the notable features that are available only on Exalytics are – columnar
compression and OBIEE specific analytic functions for TimesTen, aggressive memory and
concurrency optimizations in Essbase and OBIEE. These functions enable Exalytics to store more
data, process queries faster, load and export data faster, and handle more users and concurrent
workloads than identically configured commodity servers running commodity operating systems.
Apart from performance, the unified lifecycle experience – from install, administration, and patching
are optimized throughout the stack to provide the lowest total cost of ownership for deploying analytic
applications – that cannot be achieved by building the entire solution stack piecemeal from multiple
vendors.
Figure 2: Engineered Systems: Exalogic, Exadata, Exalytics; Applications, Database and
Analytics. The fastest, easiest path to unbeatable application performance.
References
Oracle Exadata Database Machine Brochures and Data Sheets
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
15
Oracle Tech Network Oracle Exadata Database Machine
Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Overview
Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine
Oracle BI Applications Work Better with Engineered Systems
Oracle BI Applications are optimized to work with two key Engineered Systems: Exalytics and
Exadata. Existing BI Applications customers can redeploy to Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine
and Oracle Exadata without any changes, and new BI Applications implementations can deploy on
Engineered Systems faster and with lower risk.
Figure 3: Oracle BI Applications and Oracle BI Foundation Suite run on Exalytics In-Memory
Machine. Oracle Exadata Database Machine can be a data source for Exalytics and can contain
the BI Applications data warehouse
These elements comprise the integrated solution:
• Prebuilt analytic applications content. Modules from Oracle BI Applications, and other Oracle
analytic applications that run on Exalytics.
• Oracle’s enterprise-class Business Intelligence Platform. Oracle BI Foundation Suite.
• Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine. Runs the BI Applications on Oracle BI Foundation Suite.
• Oracle Exadata Database Machine. The data warehouse defined by BI Applications optionally can
run on Exadata.
Business Benefits of Oracle BI Applications on Exalytics and Exadata
Benefit #1: Increased user satisfaction and adoption due to improved response times.
Users abandon analytic systems if response times are inadequate. With the “Consumerization of BI”
trend, expectations for lightning performance are escalating. Exalytics in-memory processing can
dramatically speed up response times.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
16
Figure 4: In a typical comparative analysis of slow-running customer dashboards, Exalytics
improves response times 5x up to 720x. For example the On Time Delivery analysis reduced from 1
hour 12 minutes to 6 seconds. With this chart scale, the timings with Exalytics are barely visible.
With BI Server cache additionally enabled, all these challenging queries further reduced to sub-
second performance.
• Faster response time means some queries that were impossible before now return answers. Queries
that were painfully slow and causing user dissatisfaction can be reduced to a few seconds or, even,
sub-second.
• Response times that are more consistently sub-second means mobile users will not abandon the
system, meaning the promise of anytime, anywhere insight can be realized.
• Executives are particularly impatient. Faster response times mean executives will use their own
dashboards, rather than consuming only others’ analysis.
• A special case to note is acceleration of federated, multisource queries. Federated queries are useful
when data is not centrally organized; however joins across large sources are slow. Exalytics can
greatly accelerate federated queries.
Benefit #2: Faster ETL for shorter load windows and more uptime.
Data warehouses need to be updated with refreshed data. Typically this is done at least daily, normally
at night during a “load window” during which the system is not available for queries.
BI Applications’ ETL from source systems to Exadata can complete much faster, which leads to
shorter load windows and more uptime. This is particularly helpful when data update volumes
threaten to exceed the planned load window, intruding on users’ access to analytics. For global
organizations with consolidated data, it is particularly painful to have a scheduled load window, since
someone somewhere on the planet is shut out of using analytics during their business day.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
17
Some businesses and applications demand frequent data refreshes, approaching continuous or “trickle
feed” updates. Faster micro ETL from sources to Exadata, and from Exadata to the Exalytics in-
memory store, enables near real time business decisions, such as 15 min updates during financial close.
Benefit #3: Better user scalability with Exal ytics economicall y satisfies bursty use and enables
broad mobile rollouts.
On standard hardware, usage of analytic systems easily can outpace system resources, leading to slower
performance for everyone. As mobile adoption increases, this becomes even more problematic, since
mobile access attracts more users, and the users tend to open up analytics more frequently, tap more to
execute more analyses, and at the same time, expectations for responsiveness are severe.
Exalytics for BI has been benchmarked to handle up to 40,000 enterprise users and typically support
3x the number of users on similarly configured hardware.
BI Applications on Exalytics exhibit much faster response times and, simultaneously better user
scalability. See Figure 5 for an illustration.
The additional capacity afforded by Exalytics means:
• Mobile BI use can grow as large as needed economically while preserving response times.
• Large user populations, such as all the people managers in a large global company can use HR
Analytics with consistently good performance during crunch periods like annual budgeting and
performance reviews.
• OLTP applications with high user counts can include rich embed analytics directly in business
processes, without negatively affecting response times.
Figure 5: Exalytics shows significant scalability advantage over standard hardware (the baseline).
The baseline is able to scale up to 15-20 CPUs, but then throughput drops. Exalytics scales
perfectly to all available CPUs and then throughput stays flat with increasing load. Benchmarks
forecast that a single Exalytics box can support up to 40,000 enterprise reporting users.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
18
Benefit #4: Project risk reduction, by choosing packaged anal ytics, Exal ytics, and optionall y
Exadata.
With a successful track record of many hundreds of customers over the past eight years, packaged BI
Applications have proven to be quick and sure to implement into production. It is common for
production implementations of one or a few BI Apps to be completed and rolled in 6-16 weeks.
Leading integrators estimate that a custom build approach costs 2.5 to 3.5 times that of deploying
prebuilt applications.
One of the greatest challenges to BI and data warehousing projects is getting the user requirements
right, since business users often have great difficulty specifying what they need. Missing requirements,
or over-specifying them, leads to more drawn out, longer projects.
It is far easier for business people to critique and edit rather than to specify, starting with a blank sheet
of paper. With the pre-defined metrics, calculations, KPIs and dashboards that come with BI
Applications, IT can quickly stand up a system for end users to see clearly what they are getting and to
specify how it should be adapted to meet specific business needs.
Oracle Engineered Systems have the advantage that every customer gets the same configuration, for
which all the components are engineered and optimized together, tested together, installed together,
patched together and updated together. This reduces risk, complexity and time to deployment, as well
as to upgrade.
BI Applications on Exalytics and Exadata are fully tested and optimized, so there is less manual
configuration, less manual tuning, and a better out of the box experience.
Benefit #5: Greater interactivity, more self-service, better visualizations
BI Applications running on BI Foundation Suite on Exalytics delivers greater levels of end-user
interactivity and self-service analysis. As an example, data visualizations such as Trellis Charts, or grids
of charts, are great for quick comparative analysis. See Figure 6.
Figure 6: Dense data visualizations like Spark Lines and Trellis Charts present the results of many
queries simultaneously, so comparative analysis and finding outliers is easier. At the same time,
these kinds of visualizations are heavily taxing on analytic and data warehouse systems.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
19
While highly valuable to end users, these kinds of visualizations challenge the capacity of normal
analytic systems and the databases underneath them. With Exalytics, in-memory performance enables
fast response time, even for these challenging visualizations that are constructed of many parallel
queries. Only with an Engineered System featuring in-memory technology can these be effectively
rendered, especially when there are large numbers of concurrent users.
The extra processing power of Exalytics can even be used for completely new capabilities like View
Suggestions. Normal business users often have difficulty picking the best chart or visualization for
their data. Think about opening a Microsoft Excel chart gallery and scrolling though the many
options—most business people can barely cope. With Oracle BI running on Exalytics, the system
automatically interrogates the data to understand how many values, its dimensionality (for example, is
time represented), and the intention of the analysis to suggest the best visualization to use. See Figure
7.
Figure 7: The View Suggestions capability of Oracle BI on Exalytics automatically analyzes the
data to be presented and suggests the best visualizations considering the size, cardinality,
distribution and dimensions of the data.
With Exalytics, better visualizations and better interactivity are delivered at the speed of thought,
pleasing business users and encouraging adoption.
Benefit #6: “ Future proof” against evolving anal ytic needs by choosing Exal ytics.
As user adoption increases and organizational maturity evolves, companies want to move beyond query
& reporting and dashboards to incorporate additional analytics, including what-if analysis, scenario
modeling, planning, access to Big Data, predictive analytics and data discovery. BI Applications, BI
Foundation Suite, and Exalytics are ready to offer users more capabilities when they need them:
• BI Foundation Suite includes Oracle Essbase, a leading multidimensional system that is necessary o
perform what-if analysis and scenario modeling. On Exalytics, Essbase runs in-memory to deliver
rapid load and calculation performance. BI Applications data can be used directly to run scenarios
and this capability can be linked directly into dashboards.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
20
• Some Oracle BI Applications have optional extensions that rely on Essbase. An example is Oracle
Spend Planning, which builds upon Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics to build accurate
spend plans tailored to the operational needs of the business, use what-if models to identify high-
opportunity spend reduction areas, proactively plan for supplier disruptions and changes in
corporate strategy, and purchase the right products at the right price from the best sources.
• Oracle offers pre-built applications on top of Essbase, including Hyperion Planning and Hyperion
Profitability and Cost Management. These can run together on the same Exalytics solution,
extending the value of the investment and enabling direct linkage between plans and actuals.
• In addition to the core Oracle BI Applications, Oracle offers more than 60 additional pre-built
analytic applications for various topics and industries. Vertical industry analytic solutions are
available for Consumer Goods, Financial Services, Insurance, Public Sector, Retail, Tax, Utilities,
Tax, and Telecommunications. Complements to core Oracle CRM, ERP, and SCM solutions
include prebuilt analytics are available for: Advanced Planning Command Center, ATG Web
Commerce, Demand Signal Repository, Environmental Accounting and Reporting,; Government,
Risk and Compliance (GRC); Manufacturing Operations Center, Primavera; Product Lifecycle; and
Transportation Management. These are all developed on Oracle BI Foundation Suite and
consequently can run in-memory on Exalytics.
• Oracle Endeca Information Discovery is an enterprise data discovery platform for rapid, intuitive
exploration and analysis of information from any combination of structured and unstructured
sources. It enables organizations to extend their existing business analytics investments to
unstructured data – such as social media, websites, content systems, files, email, database text and
Big Data. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery allows analysis alongside Oracle BI Foundation,
and both can run on Exalytics with in-memory performance.
Choosing BI Applications on Exalytics is, therefore, not a final step. Instead, as organization needs
and maturity evolves, Exalytics In-Memory Machine deliver a wide and growing variety of analytic
capabilities.
Technical Benefits of Oracle BI Applications on Exalytics and Exadata
As we have seen, BI Applications on Engineered Systems delivers great business value, but Exalytics
has additional benefits for IT.
Benefit #1: Pre-integrated solution, saving time, cost, and headaches
• Deployment is simplified, since Exalytics configurations are pre-engineered and pre-tested.
Everything is pre-determined to work together, and all runs in the Exalytics machine, eliminating
complex system topologies.
• BI Applications are integrated with Oracle transactional applications. Oracle BI Foundation
components are all integrated together, delivering a vast array of analytic capabilities for the various
users and roles. The software is integrated with the Exalytics hardware. Exalytics integrates
processors, disk, and networking.
With all this pre-integration, IT can spend less on integration and more on innovation.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
21
Benefit #2: Superior performance with less admin work
Exalytics in-memory technology, based on Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Relational Database and
optimized Oracle BI Foundation, provides superior performance with less tuning.
• Unique Exalytics capabilities like Summary Advisor simplify administration
• Moving an existing Oracle BI Applications or Oracle BI implementation from standard hardware to
Exalytics requires no application redesign. The data sources remain untouched
• Oracle Exalytics can be deployed in existing IT environments by itself or in conjunction with Oracle
Exadata and/or Oracle Exalogic to enable extreme performance and best in class user experience.
Based on proven hardware, software and in-memory technology, Oracle Exalytics lowers the total
cost of ownership, reduces operational risk and provides unprecedented analytical capability for
workgroup, departmental and enterprise wide deployments.
• Can separate Business or BI team from DW operations -- BI team or can deliver performance
without needing corporate Enterprise DW to be tuned.
Benefit #3: Not limited to the memory on board
Exalytics does away with the traditional limitation of desktop in-memory analysis tools and fully in-
memory data warehouses. Classically, when the application and data size outgrow physical memory,
you’re done. There is nothing to do but get a bigger, more expensive machine, or compromise on the
analysis you can do.
With Exalytics, users get speed-of-thought interactive visual analysis with no limits. Exalytics
intelligently caches the hottest data in-memory using full available RAM and compression. For data
not available in-memory, Oracle Exalytics transparently ships the queries to underlying data sources,
enabling analysis over any size data and even Big Data stored in Hadoop.
Benefit #4: Built for the Enterprise
Mindful that Exalytics becomes a powerful enterprise resource, it is designed with enterprise needs in
mind:
• Exalytics is designed with high reliability hardware and redundancy where required.
• Systems can be clustered for high availability.
• Scalability is superior. With a single Exalytics system benchmarked for up to 40,000 enterprise users
capacity, it easily supports thousands of concurrent users. Since Exalytics scales users and queries
linearly without sacrificing response times, there is built-in capacity to handle bursty usage, such as
when all the field employees want to begin using the system at 9:00 am on Monday morning, or
during critical periods like financial close.
• As users move to consume analytics by mobile devices, tolerance for sluggish response decreases,
and at the same time frequency of usage tends to increase. Without a sizeable backend IT
environment, user expectations cannot be met. Exalytics scalability provides the headroom to
address growing expectations of mobile users.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
22
• Subcapacity licensing is available, so if an Exalytics machine is too powerful for initial needs, a
quarter, a half, or three-quarters can be configured and licensed, enabling partial use of the compute
capacity but full use of the memory. This enables users and applications to grow over time.
• Quick Essbase backup/restore -- don't have to take Essbase down for extended periods
With these attributes, Exalytics fits well into the corporate data center.
Benefit #5: Consolidation
• Given its scalability, multiple instances of Oracle BI can be consolidated into a single instance on
Exalytics. This reduces complexity, administration headaches, and cost.
• A single Exadata Database Machine can consolidate OLTP applications and also host the BI
Applications data warehouse. Cost savings and complexity reductions through consolidation of
independent databases are key reasons customers choose Exadata.
Benefit #6: TCO
So many of the business and technical benefits contribute to lower Total Cost of Ownership. To
review, some of these are:
• Rapid, sure deployment of pre-built BI Applications and Engineered Systems, leading to fast time to
value and earlier accrual of benefits.
• Lower development and deployment costs, due to the pre-built content of BI Applications and
integration with Oracle transactional applications.
• Lower ongoing database administration costs to maintain performance, due to the Exalytics
performance optimizing in-memory technologies.
• Cost savings through environment consolidation. For Exadata, its can combine OLTP and data
warehouse databases on a single Exadata system. For Exalytics, any combination of Oracle BI,
Essbase, and Endeca Information Discovery can run and work together. Individual instances of
Essbase or OBI can be combined into larger single systems.
Conclusion
Investment in analytics is one of the leading priorities for a growing number of organizations. To gain
fact-based insights from data locked in CRM, ERP, HCM and SCM systems, a data warehouse and
effective analytics are required. However, custom building this is risky, slow, and costly.
A better solution is pre-built analytics applications leveraging powerful BI technology all running on
Engineered Systems. This combination is compelling and delivers a long list of business and technical
benefits:
• Increased user satisfaction and adoption due to improved response times
• Faster ETL for shorter load windows and more uptime
• Better user scalability economically satisfies bursty use and enables broad mobile rollouts
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
23
• Project risk reduction and faster time to value
• Greater interactivity, more self-service, and better visualizations
• “Future proof” against evolving analytic needs
• Pre-integrated solution, saving time, cost, and headaches
• Superior performance with less admin work
• Not limited to the memory on board
• Consolidation
• Lower Total Cost of Ownership
Oracle Business Analytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle
Engineered Systems
March 2013
Author: Paul Rodwick
Contributing Authors: Robin J Hazel, Mauricio
Alvarado, Rashmi Vittal
Oracle Corporation
World Headquarters
500 Oracle Parkway
Redwood Shores, CA 94065
U.S.A.
Worldwide Inquiries:
Phone: +1.650.506.7000
Fax: +1.650.506.7200
oracle.com
Copyright ©2013, Oracleand/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This
document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in
law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaimany
liability with respect to this document, and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This
document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any formor by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our
prior written permission.
Oracle and J ava are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and
are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, and the AMD Opteron logo are
trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. 0113
doc_911517037.pdf
Oracle Business Analytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle
Engineered Systems
An Oracle White Paper
March 2013
Oracle Business Analytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle
Engineered Systems
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
Disclaimer
The following is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes
only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or
functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and
timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of
Oracle.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
Executive Overview ............................................................................................. 2
Introduction ......................................................................................................... 2
Why Analytic Applications? The Business Problem ............................................. 3
Traditional Build-Your-Own Business Analytics Systems Impose Constraints . 4
New Demands for Analytic Applications .......................................................... 4
The Solution: Oracle Analytic Applications with Engineered Systems ................. 6
Oracle BI Applications – Packaged Analytic Applications ................................ 6
Oracle BI Applications – Available Modules That All Work Together................ 8
Benefits of Oracle BI Applications .................................................................. 10
Oracle BI Foundation – Enterprise-Class Business Intelligence Platform ...... 10
Introduction to Engineered Systems .............................................................. 11
Oracle BI Applications Work Better with Engineered Systems ........................... 15
Business Benefits of Oracle BI Applications on Exalytics and Exadata .......... 15
Technical Benefits of Oracle BI Applications on Exalytics and Exadata ......... 20
Conclusion ........................................................................................................ 22
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
2
Executive Overview
Business Analytics systems are required to get fact-based insight to compete effectively, and
user expectations are escalating rapidly. Pre-built analytic applications, delivered quickly and
cost-effectively with in-memory performance and enterprise scale are necessary. This white
paper examines the advantages of pre-built analytic applications for a broad range of business
processes, delivered on optimized Oracle Engineered Systems, and how they can be the
cornerstone of a vibrant, growing analytic capability that will pay ongoing dividends.
Introduction
Ask anyone in the industry. Business analytics is a hot topic, and the business press is full of
examples of leading organizations competing better through analytics. In fact, a study by
researchers at MIT and Wharton finds that “firms that adopt data-driven decision making have
output and productivity that is 5-6% higher than the competition.”
1
Extracting meaningful, actionable insight from corporate business systems is not option—it is a
requirement in order to compete effectively. Those organizations that adopt a data-driven
decision making culture are those best enabled to compete.
As the #1 vendor in Business Analytics, with the industry’s most complete and integrated
range of enterprise analytic solutions, Oracle helps organizations to grow an analytic culture to
• Increase efficiency, by continuously monitoring and quickly reacting to correct or improve
established business processes, and to do that by simplifying IT and managing risk,
• Enhance effectiveness, by identifying what to do more and what to do less, and
• Be transformational, by unleashing the creativity and power of everyone to create new
levels of differentiation to enable superior performance.
1
Brynjolfsson, Erik, Hitt, Lorin M. and Kim, Heekyung Hellen, “Strength in Numbers: How Does Data-
Driven Decisionmaking Affect Firm Performance?, ” April 22, 2011.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
3
An analytic culture requires people, and the trends are clear for user expectations of Business
Analytics: faster delivery of analytic applications, simple to use but enabling sophisticated
analysis, interactive self-service exploration with fast performance, and available anytime,
anywhere. This “Consumerization of BI” trend places increasing user expectations on
Business Analytics systems, demanding that analytical insights are instantly accessible,
visually compelling, delivered on mobile devices, all with responsive performance.
This white paper examines the difficulties companies face meeting the escalating expectations
of analytic applications, it introduces Oracle BI Applications, the Oracle BI Foundation Suite,
and Oracle Engineered Systems, and concludes with advantages of running BI Applications on
Engineered Systems.
Why Analytic Applications? The Business Problem
Today, companies realize that the information locked in enterprise and legacy systems is incredibly
valuable. Being able to analyze this information, combined with other corporate data sources is
essential to drive the business forward based on facts, rather than intuition. Although most
organizations have been investing on reporting, query tools and data warehouses for a long time, fewer
than 30% of candidate business people use BI systems they have.
2
Why so low?
First, it’s hard to build these systems and it requires specialized
skills. It’s hard to build analytic applications, to integrate
necessary technologies, to extract data from ERP and other
enterprise system, to conform and model the data, to define best
practice business metrics and Key Performance Indicators
(KPIs), and to make all that compelling and easily usable by a
range of business users. And those are just the basics.
Second, users are bringing whole new sets of expectations to
analytics around relevance, ease of use, and responsiveness.
2
James Richardson, Gartner, “The Consumerization of BI Drives Greater Adoption,” ID Number:
G00212776 , June 3, 2011.
Acronyms Defined
BI =Business Intelligence
CRM =Customer Relations Management
ERP =Enterprise Performance Management
ETL =Extraction Transformation Load
HCM =Human Capital Management
KPI =Key Performance Indicator
SCM =Supply Chain Management
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
4
Traditional Build-Your-Own Business Analytics Systems Impose Constraints
Traditionally, analytic applications have been a build-your-own affair, with each company
independently colleting requirements, extracting data, combining that data in a data warehouse, and
then providing users query and reporting tools to build their own analyses.
• It is difficult for business users to voice their requirements for analytics. They don’t know what is
possible or what peer businesses are doing. Requests for requirements are often answered with
“don’t know” or “give me everything.”
• Extracting data from complex transactional schemas of ERP, CRM, HCM SCM and other enterprise
applications, consolidating and integrating data from heterogeneous systems and applications, and
reconciling and validating data quality are all specialized skills and the work takes time. Skilled data
architects, data warehouse designers and ETL programmers are needed to build from scratch.
• Often a selection of tools and technologies need to be integrated in order to fulfill the range of
analytics needs.
• As data sizes and user volumes increase, ongoing administration and performance tuning is needed,
else the system can get bogged down.
New Demands for Analytic Applications
Business users have higher expectations than ever before, as they experience the “Google effect” of
searches being returned instantaneously, and consumer devices like the iPhone, which are easy to use
and optimized for particular functions. Based on the experience of thousands of analytics
implementations, both custom-built and using prebuilt analytic applications, the following
requirements emerge:
These expectations include:
• Integrate diverse corporate sources of information into an enterprise view. The reality for
almost all organizations is relevant data is stored in fragmented sources. Analytics on a particular
silo of information is useful, but creating a consolidated enterprise-wide view is much more
beneficial. With the consistency of an enterprise data model, business can perform analysis across
subject areas, enabling, for instance, a company to detect customer satisfaction problems are tied to
delayed shipments, which are in turn caused by slow accounts payable to critical vendors.
• Trusted metrics, following industry best practices. Monitoring metrics and Key Performance
Indicators (KPIs) is the lifeblood of performance management. A palette of pre-defined industry
best practices metrics, built off curated, trustworthy data sources, and presented in understandable,
easy to navigate dashboards is a base requirement. And, businesses need to be able to configure
these as necessary for their specific organizations.
• Clean, clear dashboards and reports, designed for instant understandability. A single metric
or KPI is no use without context. How does the number compare with this period last year? How
has market share shifted over time? What is the trend in on-time shipments? These typical business
questions can require complex calculations, well-designed dashboard layout, context, and guided
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
5
analysis paths. This level of design is typically beyond the skills of most users and, even, most IT
professionals.
• Rich data visualization including location-based, geospatial views. In order to gain the best
understanding of the data being analyzed, and for people to engage their right brains, appropriate
visualizations are needed.
• Interactive, self-service exploration. Once a problem is detected, business users want to “drill
down” and perform additional analysis to uncover root cause problems. They may want also to
specialize an existing report or dashboard, or to create their own analysis to reuse and share.
• Model outcomes and run what-if scenarios. After a problem is detected and diagnosed, then
what? Businesses want to model what actions to take through scenario modeling, to answer
questions like “What if I reorganized sales territories and comp plans? Which choices would lead to
the best outcomes?”
• See what’s happening now and what is likely to happen in the future. As companies mature
in their analytic capabilities, they desire to move beyond analyzing history—too late to affect the
business results—and react in near-real time. As sophistication rises, they want to employ advanced
predictive analytics to see what’s likely to happen. Advanced analytics like data mining and statistical
techniques can project what is likely to happen in the future.
• Mobile, anytime, anywhere. Gartner estimates that 33% of BI content in 2013
3
will be consumed
by mobile devices. There is no doubt that demand for mobile intelligence is exploding. Today’s
mobile workforce demands access to the information they need, wherever they are, securely with no
additional development or compromise in functionality or form factor.
• Combine structured with unstructured data and Big Data. While analytics predominantly are
used for structured, tabular data, there can be great business advantage to involve unstructured data
that might include verbatim text in ERP or CRM systems, external social media feeds like Twitter
and Facebook, or to access unstructured information stored in Hadoop.
• Integrated technology and analysis tools. Different users have different levels of analytic
inclination and skills. Some want merely to consume pre-built analysis, and others want to develop
what-if models, predictive models, or analytic applications for others to consume. Organizations’
analytic needs mature and broaden over time. Therefore, a range of analytic capabilities is needed,
but in many instances, the customer’s IT department is left to integrate all the necessary
technologies. Pre-integrated BI technology with a broad range of functionality for today’s and
tomorrow’s requirements is preferable.
3
Tapadinhas, Joao. "Critical Capabilities for Mobile BI." Gartner, Inc., ID Number: G00224286,
10 Apr. 2012.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
6
This is a challenging list that requires a variety of skills and technologies. Thus, it is hard and expensive
for organizations to tackle these items on their own, or just by hiring IT consultants.
The Solution: Oracle Analytic Applications with Engineered
Systems
Prebuilt analytic applications, delivered on a complete and integrated BI technology foundation, and
running in optimized Engineered Systems are the way to go. This combination assures the easiest,
most risk free implementation, is proven to deliver strong business value, delivers speed-of-thought
performance and massive scale, and is aligned with Oracle technology and applications strategies, while
remaining open to work with each customer’s individual IT environment.
Oracle BI Applications – Packaged Analytic Applications
Although every organization has some unique reporting and analysis needs that require custom
applications, many requirements can be addressed through packaged analytic applications. The basic
analytic requirements of common functional groups such as finance, human resources (HR), sales, and
procurement are similar among organizations or industries. For example, finance departments in nearly
all private and public sector organizations must continuously measure and monitor trends and
variances of their general ledger accounts, accounts receivables, accounts payables, and fixed assets.
With Oracle Business Intelligence Applications:
• Finance professionals have visibility into cash flow, gross margins, operating expenses, account
balances, and business unit profitability.
• HR professionals can gain insights into headcount trends, employee attrition rates, and the
effectiveness of training programs.
• Procurement and supply chain professionals can track parts and material trends, supplier
performance, trade discounts, and warranty return costs.
• Marketing professionals can monitor the efficacy of promotions and campaigns and make
adjustments that maximize success rates.
• Sales professionals can more effectively forecast revenues and transactions, manage the pipeline,
and track key opportunities.
• Service managers can optimize call center and depot staffing levels, identify problem areas that
need attention, and respond more effectively to customer service calls.
• Executives can get cross-enterprise views of their businesses, incorporating metrics and KPIs from
all the available BI Applications content.
Oracle BI Applications are complete, pre-built BI solutions that help people at all levels of an
organization better understand how their business is performing. Because these applications are pre-
built and pre-integrated with the leading transactional applications, they are far quicker to implement
and deliver value with much lower risk. Once in place enable better decisions, confident action, and
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
7
more efficient business processes, often in just weeks. Oracle BI Applications provide a single,
integrated view of enterprise information, enabling greater insight and alignment across business
functions.
Each BI Application includes:
• Pre-integration with Oracle Applications JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, PeopleSoft, Siebel, E-
Business Suite, and/or Fusion applications. The BI applications understand the source schemas of
business applications and provide prebuilt logic to extract data from sources systems, and then
transform and load into a data warehouse data model
• A best practices enterprise analytic data model consisting of star schemas with conformed
dimensions. This means that a customer is a customer is a customer across all the family of BI
Applications, and if several are installed together, analysis can be expanded across subject areas for
an end-to-end view of corporate performance. All the major entities are covered, including
Customers, Employees, Suppliers, Projects, Orders, GL entries, and many more.
• The ability to work with multiple and disparate data sources. Oftentimes companies might have
a CRM instance for Europe, one for the Americas, and another one for Asia Pacific. BI
Applications can combine these instances. As well, BI Applications can integrate data from
heterogeneous systems. For example, a company might have Siebel CRM, PeopleSoft HCM, and E-
Business Suite Financials.
• Open access to all data sources. The metadata-driven design of BI Applications allows
implementers to integrate data sources for which Oracle doesn’t offer pre-built adapters.
• Role-based reports and dashboards for all levels of employees in most departments. Dashboards
include guided navigations, to enable casual users to find the insights they need.
• Security integration to Oracle applications, enabling leverage of roles, profiles, and security set-
ups defined in transactional applications.
• Thousands of pre-defined metrics and calculations across the suite of BI Applications. This
provides a palette of metrics to choose from, which is much easier than collecting user requirements.
If the predefined calculation of a metric doesn’t fit your business, it can easily be modified, from
which point all affected dashboards and reports are automatically updated.
• Anytime, Anywhere Mobile access. The BI Applications are ready to deploy on iPad tablets with
no further development.
With so much pre-built content, implementing Oracle BI Applications is an exercise in configuring and
editing, rather than building from scratch. This has proven many times to deliver enterprise-grade
analytics into production often in 6, 10, or 12 weeks, in contrast to year or longer enterprise data
warehouse builds. See Figure 1.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
8
Figure 1. Using Oracle BI Applications significantly reduces the time to implement and deploy,
resulting in faster time to value and lower risk. BI Applications often can be deployed into
production in a matter of weeks, rather than half a year, a year, or more, for custom-built solutions.
In addition to rapid time to value, BI Applications embody analytic best practices—in the design of
ETL, the data warehouse data model, metrics and KPIs, and dashboard design. In practice, it would
be hard for an individual company to craft such as solution on its own.
Oracle BI Applications – Available Modules That All Work Together
Table 1 lists the core Oracle BI Applications.
TABLE 1. ORACLE BI APPLICATIONS
APPLICATION DESCRIPTION
ERP Anal ytics
Financi al
Anal yti cs
Oracle Financial Analytics provides organizations detailed analysis into the factors that drive revenues,
costs, and shareholder value. It helps front-line and financial managers improve financial performance with
complete, up-to-the-minute information on their departments' expenses and revenue contributions, cash
flow, and profitability, while maintaining more accurate, timely, and transparent financial reporting that helps
ensure Sarbanes-Oxley compliance
HR Anal ytics Oracle Human Resources Analytics provides organizations detailed analysis on HR programs and
workforce performance. HR staff, business executives, and front-line managers have access to the critical
workforce information required to analyze workforce staffing and productivity, and to better design
compensation that rewards performance.
Procurement
and Spend
Anal yti cs
Oracle Procurement & Spend Analytics helps organizations optimize their supply side performance by
integrating data from across the enterprise value chain. Organizations benefit from increased visibility into
Corporate Spend and complete source-to-pay process, including comprehensive sourcing and procurement
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
9
analysis, supplier performance analysis, supplier payables analysis, and Employee Expenses.
Suppl y Chai n
and Order
Management
Anal yti cs
Oracle Supply Chain and Order Management Analytics delivers deep customer insight into sales orders and
inventory data that empowers organizations to make better decisions in each stage of the supply chain
management lifecycle. Organizations are able to assess inventory levels, likely product fulfillment needs,
quickly identify potential order backlog issues, and stay on top of critical A/R and DSO issues.
Project
Anal yti cs
Oracle Project Analytics provides out-of-the-box, role-based dashboards that enable project managers,
executives, and accountants to monitor projects and control the risks that lead to budget and schedule
overruns. It enables robust analysis of important project-based forecast, budgets, cost, revenue, billing,
commitments, cross-charges, profitability, resource management and sub ledger to general ledger
reconciliation.
Student
Information
Anal yti cs
Oracle Student Information Analytics helps academic institutions effectively manage student information,
improve operations, and achieve institutional excellence. It provides an integrated view of admissions and
recruiting, student records and student financials, enabling organizations to maximize student recruiting
efforts, shorten time-to-graduation, improve retention rates, identify successful and unsuccessful courses
and programs, and analyze faculty workloads
Manufacturing
Anal yti cs
Oracle Manufacturing Analytics helps manufacturing organizations optimize their supply networks by
integrating data from across the enterprise value chain. Through complete end-to-end insight into the
manufacturing operations and visibility across the plants and business units, organizations can significantly
reduce costs; enhance profitability, increase customer satisfaction, and gain competitive advantage.
Enterprise
Asset
Management
Anal yti cs
Oracle Enterprise Asset Management Analytics provides visibility to enterprise-wide
maintenance information. With pre-built reports covering Maintenance History, Maintenance Cost Analysis
and Maintenance Work Orders, Oracle Enterprise Asset Management Analytics enables Maintenance
Managers to maximize performance and opportunities, identify potential issues much in advance,
and address them before they escalate into serious problems.
CRM Anal ytics
Marketi ng
Anal yti cs
Oracle Marketing Analytics allows your organization to obtain maximum results from your marketing
investments by providing your entire marketing team with a complete, up-to-the-minute picture of customer
preferences, buying behavior, and profitability. Oracle Marketing Analytics helps you to develop closer, more
valuable customer and prospect relationships and improve marketing effectiveness.
Sales
Anal yti cs
Oracle Sales Analytics provides hundreds of key performance indicators to improve the effectiveness of
your sales people by providing real-time, actionable insight into every sales opportunity at the point of
customer contact. With more accurate sales forecasts and enhanced identification of potential problems and
opportunities, Oracle Sales Analytics helps close business faster and increase overall sales revenue.
Price
Anal yti cs
Oracle Price Analytics enables users to make insight-driven pricing decisions, to measure pricing
effectiveness and to take improvement actions, informed by consistent data and the right business context.
Users are armed with visibility into a single consolidated view of profitability and simple-but-sophisticated
analytic tools and alerts.
Service
Anal yti cs
Oracle Service Analytics provides organizations with a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of customer
service effectiveness. It enables companies to take targeted actions to improve productivity of Service
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
10
centers, reduce costs, and increase customer satisfaction.
Contact
Center
Anal yti cs
Oracle Contact Center Telephony Analytics provides organizations with powerful insight that enables them
to analyze all aspects of contact center performance. The solution provides best-practice metrics, alerts,
and key performance indicators (KPIs), enabling companies to take targeted action to improve employee
productivity, reduce costs, and increase customer satisfaction.
Loyal ty
Anal yti cs
Oracle Loyalty Analytics is a comprehensive analytic solution that provides new levels of information
richness, usability and reach to all employees engaged in the loyalty program lifecycle. This results in faster
and more informed decisions that help the loyalty organization optimize its programs to drive member
behavior, build value and reduce costs.
Benefits of Oracle BI Applications
Oracle BI Applications provide benefits in three key areas: deeper business insight, improved
alignment, and greater leverage.
• Insight. Oracle BI Applications enable users to gain visibility and insight into business
performance, processes, and customers. As a result they enable better decisions, actions and control
at all levels. People can respond faster to opportunities and threats, and can identify and replicate
best practices.
• Alignment. People in all roles gain a single, consistent view of enterprise information across
functions and data sources. They are able to align strategy and execution across functions, and can
use guided analytics and best practice analytic workflows to drive the most profitable or efficient
actions.
• Leverage. Oracle BI Applications let people do more with less – to deploy BI more broadly across
the organization with fewer IT resources than custom-built solutions. Oracle BI Applications
accelerate time-to-value, lower TCO and risk, and increase the value of existing data and applications
including CRM and ERP systems.
Oracle BI Foundation – Enterprise-Class Business Intelligence Platform
Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite—recognized as a category leader by all of the major
industry analyst research firms—represents the underlying BI technology for all of Oracle’s packaged
analytic applications, as well as business applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite; Oracle’s
PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel solutions; Oracle Fusion Applications; and Oracle’s industry
applications.
BI Foundation is a comprehensive architecture, which features best-in-class technology for reporting,
analysis, and performance management applications. Based on an integrated, scalable, web-native
architecture, Oracle’s unified and open BI Foundation reduces cost of ownership, efficiently accesses
information from heterogeneous sources, and provides an enterprise semantic layer with multiple
channels of information delivery to support self-service, pervasive BI.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
11
Introduction to Engineered Systems
Oracle’s engineered systems combine best-of-breed hardware and software components with game-
changing technical innovations. Designed, engineered, and tested to work best together, Oracle’s
engineered systems can power the cloud or streamline data center operations to make traditional
deployments even more efficient. The components of Oracle’s engineered systems are preassembled
for targeted functionality and then—as a complete system—optimized for extreme performance. By
taking the guesswork out of these highly available, purpose-built solutions, Oracle delivers a solution
that is integrated across every layer of the technology stack—a simplicity that translates into less risk
and lower costs for your business. Only Oracle can innovate and optimize at every layer of the stack to
simplify data center operations, drive down costs, and accelerate business innovation.
Oracle Exalogic
Oracle Exalogic is an Engineered System on which enterprises deploy Oracle business applications,
Oracle Fusion Middleware or third-party software products. Exalogic comes pre-built with compute
nodes, memory, flash storage and centralized storage, all connected using InfiniBand in a high
redundancy architecture delivering five-nines availability, with fault tolerance and zero-down-time
maintenance.
Exalogic dramatically improves performance of Oracle Applications, Fusion Middleware and 3rd party
applications without requiring code changes and reduces costs across the application lifecycle, from
initial set-up to on-going maintenance, as compared to conventional hardware platforms. Oracle has
made unique optimizations and enhancements in Exalogic firmware, Exalogic software, and in Oracle’s
middleware and Oracles applications. These include on-chip network virtualization based on near zero
latency Infiniband fabric, high-performance Remote Direct Memory Access, workload management in
Oracle Weblogic server and optimizations in Oracle Coherence and Oracle Traffic Director. Exalogic
includes support for a highly optimized version of the Oracle VM, which significantly outperforms
comparable virtualization solutions and is an ideal consolidation platform for Oracle Applications.
Templates to simplify install, deployment and configuration of Applications on Exalogic are available.
What specific technical benefits does Exalogic deliver?
Applications using WebLogic benefit from a number of optimizations for thread efficiency, faster
interprocess communication and higher message throughput. An optimized work scheduler for
Exalogic balances the number of threads per core available on Exalogic systems, providing better
application processing efficiency. WebLogic Server has changed to use shared byte buffers instead of
array copies when passing data, improving application interprocess communication performance and a
66% reduction in number of objects created. This reduces heap usage and results in fewer expensive
garbage collections for Applications. WebLogic also optimizes socket calls to reduce lock contention
on Exalogic, allowing fewer threads to process a larger number of message requests.
Exalogic Oracle VM can be used to sub-divide a physical compute node into multiple virtual machines
to increase application deployment efficiency while maintaining application performance. Oracle VM
has been engineered for tight integration with Exalogic Exabus I/O backplane using a technique called
Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) ensuring Oracle VM significantly outperforms comparable
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
12
hypervisors from other leading vendors. The benefit of this approach is unmatched application
performance. In an Exalogic configuration, the impact of virtualization on application throughput and
latency is negligible.
Applications running on Exalogic utilize Exabus, the underlying Infiniband fabric, which provides low
latency and high throughput eliminating I/O bottlenecks in every application layer. Applications
components are typically deployed in more than one server and Exabus provides low latency for I/O
across nodes on same Exalogic rack. Access to ZFS storage device over Exabus greatly reduces latency
for log file writes and other file access operations. For applications running on Exalogic and accessing
database tier on Exadata, Exabus delivers faster I/O, reduces CPU usage on both the mid-tier and DB-
tier and provides higher connection pooling efficiency.
Oracle Exadata Database Machine
Oracle’s Exadata Database Machine is Oracle’s database platform delivering extreme performance for
database applications including Online Transaction Processing, Data Warehousing, Reporting, Batch
Processing, or Consolidation of mixed database workloads. Exadata is a pre-configured, pre-tuned, and
pre-tested integrated system of servers, networking and storage all optimized around the Oracle
database. Because Exadata is an integrated system, it offers superior price-performance, availability and
supportability. Exadata frees users from the need to build, test and maintain systems and allows them
to focus on higher value business problems.
Exadata uses a scale out architecture for database servers and storage. This architecture maintains an
optimal storage hierarchy from memory to flash to disk. Smart Scan query offload has been added to
the storage cells to offload database processing. Exadata implements Smart Flash Cache as part of the
storage hierarchy. Exadata software determines how and when to use the Flash storage for reads and
write as well as how best to incorporate Flash into the database as part of a coordinated data caching
strategy. A high-bandwidth low-latency InfiniBand network running specialized database networking
protocols connects all the components inside an Exadata Database Machine. In addition to a high
performance architecture and design, Exadata offers the industry’s best data compression to provide a
dramatic reduction in storage needs.
What specific technical benefits does Exadata deliver?
Exadata Smart Flash Cache uses Flash memory to dramatically reduce the time to read and write
database and log records. The intelligence in Smart Flash Cache transparently moves active database
blocks from disk to flash in real time, thus ensuring that "hot" data is in Flash memory when the next
access occurs. Blocks that should not be in Flash are similarly recognized; thus maximizing the amount
of space in Flash for active data.
Exadata Smart Scan speeds up data-intensive queries by leveraging the processing power of Exadata
Storage Servers to scan and filter out results. By moving queries to storage instead of moving the data
to the database servers, long-running reports and queries often complete 10x faster than on
conventional systems.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
13
The use of InfiniBand as the networking fabric within Exadata ensures the lowest latency for messages
and the highest bandwidth for data transfers. High-speed transactions as well as data-intensive queries
and reports reap the benefits.
Exadata Scale-Out Storage enables the full performance of Exadata to be realized against large and
growing databases, without fear of bottlenecks. As the database size grows and storage capacity is
added to Exadata, storage performance and networking bandwidth scale in equal proportion.
IORM allocates I/O bandwidth across different applications and databases, based on a prioritized
allocation plan, to ensure that the most important applications get the performance they need when
they need it.
Hybrid Columnar Compression dramatically reduces the storage space consumed by the database,
while at the same time speeding up queries against the compressed data through reduced I/O.
Compression often reduces the data storage by a factor of 10x or more, storing a petabyte scale
database in 100TB of disk. Since compressed tables remain compressed in Flash memory as well as on
disk, very large databases often fit entirely in Flash memory when compressed.
Oracle Exal ytics
As analytic applications become more sophisticated and calculation-intensive, the use of mobile BI
expands, user adoption increases, and data volumes explode making the need for speed and efficiency
more important than ever. In-memory technology can dramatically accelerate analytic performance.
Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine is the industry’s first engineered system for analytics that
combines market leading BI Foundation, in-memory analytics software, and best-in class hardware
engineered and optimized to work together to deliver extreme performance for Business Intelligence
and Enterprise Performance Management applications. As a result, users can visually navigate and drill
into information at the speed of thought, without limits on the complexity of their questions or the
volume of the underlying data. Exalytics drives a new class of smarter and more powerful analytic
applications that simply weren’t possible using conventional BI software and generic hardware
configurations.
Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite running on Oracle Exalytics has been specially enhanced
to take advantage of large memory, processors, concurrency, storage, networking, operating system,
kernel, and system configuration afforded by the Oracle Exalytics hardware. Oracle TimesTen for
Exalytics has been specially enhanced for analytical processing at in-memory speeds. With lightening
fast scan speed of up to 100 million rows/second and up to 10x columnar compression, TimesTen for
in-memory analytics delivers faster reports & dashboards for departmental as well as enterprise wide
consumption.
What is technically unique about Exalytics?
Exalytics is custom designed for In-memory Analytics. It packs at least a Terabyte of high speed
memory and matches the memory backed by several terabytes of high-speed PCI-Flash that can
support hundreds of thousands of IOPS per second as well as gigabytes of bandwidth per second. This
flash layer is further backed by several terabytes of persistent hard disk storage. Exalytics also includes
FibreChannel interfaces to further expand storage capacity.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
14
In addition to memory and storage, Exalytics includes the best server processors in the market with at
least 40 compute cores with several execution threads per core. Exalytics also provides numerous high
speed networking options including 10Gbps and 1Gbps Ethernet. However specifically for Exadata
connectivity, Exalytics also includes two 40Gbps InfiniBand interfaces and cables to ensure
unparalleled latency and throughput between Exalytics and Exadata.
Exalytics software components have been optimized tightly to match the hardware – all the way to
specific hardware parts, their firmware, drivers and the operating system – a customized Oracle
Enterprise Linux release with Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. These low level optimizations have
shown 3X better scalability and performance on benchmarks compared to similarly configured
commodity servers. Some of the notable features that are available only on Exalytics are – columnar
compression and OBIEE specific analytic functions for TimesTen, aggressive memory and
concurrency optimizations in Essbase and OBIEE. These functions enable Exalytics to store more
data, process queries faster, load and export data faster, and handle more users and concurrent
workloads than identically configured commodity servers running commodity operating systems.
Apart from performance, the unified lifecycle experience – from install, administration, and patching
are optimized throughout the stack to provide the lowest total cost of ownership for deploying analytic
applications – that cannot be achieved by building the entire solution stack piecemeal from multiple
vendors.
Figure 2: Engineered Systems: Exalogic, Exadata, Exalytics; Applications, Database and
Analytics. The fastest, easiest path to unbeatable application performance.
References
Oracle Exadata Database Machine Brochures and Data Sheets
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
15
Oracle Tech Network Oracle Exadata Database Machine
Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Overview
Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine
Oracle BI Applications Work Better with Engineered Systems
Oracle BI Applications are optimized to work with two key Engineered Systems: Exalytics and
Exadata. Existing BI Applications customers can redeploy to Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine
and Oracle Exadata without any changes, and new BI Applications implementations can deploy on
Engineered Systems faster and with lower risk.
Figure 3: Oracle BI Applications and Oracle BI Foundation Suite run on Exalytics In-Memory
Machine. Oracle Exadata Database Machine can be a data source for Exalytics and can contain
the BI Applications data warehouse
These elements comprise the integrated solution:
• Prebuilt analytic applications content. Modules from Oracle BI Applications, and other Oracle
analytic applications that run on Exalytics.
• Oracle’s enterprise-class Business Intelligence Platform. Oracle BI Foundation Suite.
• Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine. Runs the BI Applications on Oracle BI Foundation Suite.
• Oracle Exadata Database Machine. The data warehouse defined by BI Applications optionally can
run on Exadata.
Business Benefits of Oracle BI Applications on Exalytics and Exadata
Benefit #1: Increased user satisfaction and adoption due to improved response times.
Users abandon analytic systems if response times are inadequate. With the “Consumerization of BI”
trend, expectations for lightning performance are escalating. Exalytics in-memory processing can
dramatically speed up response times.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
16
Figure 4: In a typical comparative analysis of slow-running customer dashboards, Exalytics
improves response times 5x up to 720x. For example the On Time Delivery analysis reduced from 1
hour 12 minutes to 6 seconds. With this chart scale, the timings with Exalytics are barely visible.
With BI Server cache additionally enabled, all these challenging queries further reduced to sub-
second performance.
• Faster response time means some queries that were impossible before now return answers. Queries
that were painfully slow and causing user dissatisfaction can be reduced to a few seconds or, even,
sub-second.
• Response times that are more consistently sub-second means mobile users will not abandon the
system, meaning the promise of anytime, anywhere insight can be realized.
• Executives are particularly impatient. Faster response times mean executives will use their own
dashboards, rather than consuming only others’ analysis.
• A special case to note is acceleration of federated, multisource queries. Federated queries are useful
when data is not centrally organized; however joins across large sources are slow. Exalytics can
greatly accelerate federated queries.
Benefit #2: Faster ETL for shorter load windows and more uptime.
Data warehouses need to be updated with refreshed data. Typically this is done at least daily, normally
at night during a “load window” during which the system is not available for queries.
BI Applications’ ETL from source systems to Exadata can complete much faster, which leads to
shorter load windows and more uptime. This is particularly helpful when data update volumes
threaten to exceed the planned load window, intruding on users’ access to analytics. For global
organizations with consolidated data, it is particularly painful to have a scheduled load window, since
someone somewhere on the planet is shut out of using analytics during their business day.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
17
Some businesses and applications demand frequent data refreshes, approaching continuous or “trickle
feed” updates. Faster micro ETL from sources to Exadata, and from Exadata to the Exalytics in-
memory store, enables near real time business decisions, such as 15 min updates during financial close.
Benefit #3: Better user scalability with Exal ytics economicall y satisfies bursty use and enables
broad mobile rollouts.
On standard hardware, usage of analytic systems easily can outpace system resources, leading to slower
performance for everyone. As mobile adoption increases, this becomes even more problematic, since
mobile access attracts more users, and the users tend to open up analytics more frequently, tap more to
execute more analyses, and at the same time, expectations for responsiveness are severe.
Exalytics for BI has been benchmarked to handle up to 40,000 enterprise users and typically support
3x the number of users on similarly configured hardware.
BI Applications on Exalytics exhibit much faster response times and, simultaneously better user
scalability. See Figure 5 for an illustration.
The additional capacity afforded by Exalytics means:
• Mobile BI use can grow as large as needed economically while preserving response times.
• Large user populations, such as all the people managers in a large global company can use HR
Analytics with consistently good performance during crunch periods like annual budgeting and
performance reviews.
• OLTP applications with high user counts can include rich embed analytics directly in business
processes, without negatively affecting response times.
Figure 5: Exalytics shows significant scalability advantage over standard hardware (the baseline).
The baseline is able to scale up to 15-20 CPUs, but then throughput drops. Exalytics scales
perfectly to all available CPUs and then throughput stays flat with increasing load. Benchmarks
forecast that a single Exalytics box can support up to 40,000 enterprise reporting users.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
18
Benefit #4: Project risk reduction, by choosing packaged anal ytics, Exal ytics, and optionall y
Exadata.
With a successful track record of many hundreds of customers over the past eight years, packaged BI
Applications have proven to be quick and sure to implement into production. It is common for
production implementations of one or a few BI Apps to be completed and rolled in 6-16 weeks.
Leading integrators estimate that a custom build approach costs 2.5 to 3.5 times that of deploying
prebuilt applications.
One of the greatest challenges to BI and data warehousing projects is getting the user requirements
right, since business users often have great difficulty specifying what they need. Missing requirements,
or over-specifying them, leads to more drawn out, longer projects.
It is far easier for business people to critique and edit rather than to specify, starting with a blank sheet
of paper. With the pre-defined metrics, calculations, KPIs and dashboards that come with BI
Applications, IT can quickly stand up a system for end users to see clearly what they are getting and to
specify how it should be adapted to meet specific business needs.
Oracle Engineered Systems have the advantage that every customer gets the same configuration, for
which all the components are engineered and optimized together, tested together, installed together,
patched together and updated together. This reduces risk, complexity and time to deployment, as well
as to upgrade.
BI Applications on Exalytics and Exadata are fully tested and optimized, so there is less manual
configuration, less manual tuning, and a better out of the box experience.
Benefit #5: Greater interactivity, more self-service, better visualizations
BI Applications running on BI Foundation Suite on Exalytics delivers greater levels of end-user
interactivity and self-service analysis. As an example, data visualizations such as Trellis Charts, or grids
of charts, are great for quick comparative analysis. See Figure 6.
Figure 6: Dense data visualizations like Spark Lines and Trellis Charts present the results of many
queries simultaneously, so comparative analysis and finding outliers is easier. At the same time,
these kinds of visualizations are heavily taxing on analytic and data warehouse systems.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
19
While highly valuable to end users, these kinds of visualizations challenge the capacity of normal
analytic systems and the databases underneath them. With Exalytics, in-memory performance enables
fast response time, even for these challenging visualizations that are constructed of many parallel
queries. Only with an Engineered System featuring in-memory technology can these be effectively
rendered, especially when there are large numbers of concurrent users.
The extra processing power of Exalytics can even be used for completely new capabilities like View
Suggestions. Normal business users often have difficulty picking the best chart or visualization for
their data. Think about opening a Microsoft Excel chart gallery and scrolling though the many
options—most business people can barely cope. With Oracle BI running on Exalytics, the system
automatically interrogates the data to understand how many values, its dimensionality (for example, is
time represented), and the intention of the analysis to suggest the best visualization to use. See Figure
7.
Figure 7: The View Suggestions capability of Oracle BI on Exalytics automatically analyzes the
data to be presented and suggests the best visualizations considering the size, cardinality,
distribution and dimensions of the data.
With Exalytics, better visualizations and better interactivity are delivered at the speed of thought,
pleasing business users and encouraging adoption.
Benefit #6: “ Future proof” against evolving anal ytic needs by choosing Exal ytics.
As user adoption increases and organizational maturity evolves, companies want to move beyond query
& reporting and dashboards to incorporate additional analytics, including what-if analysis, scenario
modeling, planning, access to Big Data, predictive analytics and data discovery. BI Applications, BI
Foundation Suite, and Exalytics are ready to offer users more capabilities when they need them:
• BI Foundation Suite includes Oracle Essbase, a leading multidimensional system that is necessary o
perform what-if analysis and scenario modeling. On Exalytics, Essbase runs in-memory to deliver
rapid load and calculation performance. BI Applications data can be used directly to run scenarios
and this capability can be linked directly into dashboards.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
20
• Some Oracle BI Applications have optional extensions that rely on Essbase. An example is Oracle
Spend Planning, which builds upon Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics to build accurate
spend plans tailored to the operational needs of the business, use what-if models to identify high-
opportunity spend reduction areas, proactively plan for supplier disruptions and changes in
corporate strategy, and purchase the right products at the right price from the best sources.
• Oracle offers pre-built applications on top of Essbase, including Hyperion Planning and Hyperion
Profitability and Cost Management. These can run together on the same Exalytics solution,
extending the value of the investment and enabling direct linkage between plans and actuals.
• In addition to the core Oracle BI Applications, Oracle offers more than 60 additional pre-built
analytic applications for various topics and industries. Vertical industry analytic solutions are
available for Consumer Goods, Financial Services, Insurance, Public Sector, Retail, Tax, Utilities,
Tax, and Telecommunications. Complements to core Oracle CRM, ERP, and SCM solutions
include prebuilt analytics are available for: Advanced Planning Command Center, ATG Web
Commerce, Demand Signal Repository, Environmental Accounting and Reporting,; Government,
Risk and Compliance (GRC); Manufacturing Operations Center, Primavera; Product Lifecycle; and
Transportation Management. These are all developed on Oracle BI Foundation Suite and
consequently can run in-memory on Exalytics.
• Oracle Endeca Information Discovery is an enterprise data discovery platform for rapid, intuitive
exploration and analysis of information from any combination of structured and unstructured
sources. It enables organizations to extend their existing business analytics investments to
unstructured data – such as social media, websites, content systems, files, email, database text and
Big Data. Oracle Endeca Information Discovery allows analysis alongside Oracle BI Foundation,
and both can run on Exalytics with in-memory performance.
Choosing BI Applications on Exalytics is, therefore, not a final step. Instead, as organization needs
and maturity evolves, Exalytics In-Memory Machine deliver a wide and growing variety of analytic
capabilities.
Technical Benefits of Oracle BI Applications on Exalytics and Exadata
As we have seen, BI Applications on Engineered Systems delivers great business value, but Exalytics
has additional benefits for IT.
Benefit #1: Pre-integrated solution, saving time, cost, and headaches
• Deployment is simplified, since Exalytics configurations are pre-engineered and pre-tested.
Everything is pre-determined to work together, and all runs in the Exalytics machine, eliminating
complex system topologies.
• BI Applications are integrated with Oracle transactional applications. Oracle BI Foundation
components are all integrated together, delivering a vast array of analytic capabilities for the various
users and roles. The software is integrated with the Exalytics hardware. Exalytics integrates
processors, disk, and networking.
With all this pre-integration, IT can spend less on integration and more on innovation.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
21
Benefit #2: Superior performance with less admin work
Exalytics in-memory technology, based on Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Relational Database and
optimized Oracle BI Foundation, provides superior performance with less tuning.
• Unique Exalytics capabilities like Summary Advisor simplify administration
• Moving an existing Oracle BI Applications or Oracle BI implementation from standard hardware to
Exalytics requires no application redesign. The data sources remain untouched
• Oracle Exalytics can be deployed in existing IT environments by itself or in conjunction with Oracle
Exadata and/or Oracle Exalogic to enable extreme performance and best in class user experience.
Based on proven hardware, software and in-memory technology, Oracle Exalytics lowers the total
cost of ownership, reduces operational risk and provides unprecedented analytical capability for
workgroup, departmental and enterprise wide deployments.
• Can separate Business or BI team from DW operations -- BI team or can deliver performance
without needing corporate Enterprise DW to be tuned.
Benefit #3: Not limited to the memory on board
Exalytics does away with the traditional limitation of desktop in-memory analysis tools and fully in-
memory data warehouses. Classically, when the application and data size outgrow physical memory,
you’re done. There is nothing to do but get a bigger, more expensive machine, or compromise on the
analysis you can do.
With Exalytics, users get speed-of-thought interactive visual analysis with no limits. Exalytics
intelligently caches the hottest data in-memory using full available RAM and compression. For data
not available in-memory, Oracle Exalytics transparently ships the queries to underlying data sources,
enabling analysis over any size data and even Big Data stored in Hadoop.
Benefit #4: Built for the Enterprise
Mindful that Exalytics becomes a powerful enterprise resource, it is designed with enterprise needs in
mind:
• Exalytics is designed with high reliability hardware and redundancy where required.
• Systems can be clustered for high availability.
• Scalability is superior. With a single Exalytics system benchmarked for up to 40,000 enterprise users
capacity, it easily supports thousands of concurrent users. Since Exalytics scales users and queries
linearly without sacrificing response times, there is built-in capacity to handle bursty usage, such as
when all the field employees want to begin using the system at 9:00 am on Monday morning, or
during critical periods like financial close.
• As users move to consume analytics by mobile devices, tolerance for sluggish response decreases,
and at the same time frequency of usage tends to increase. Without a sizeable backend IT
environment, user expectations cannot be met. Exalytics scalability provides the headroom to
address growing expectations of mobile users.
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
22
• Subcapacity licensing is available, so if an Exalytics machine is too powerful for initial needs, a
quarter, a half, or three-quarters can be configured and licensed, enabling partial use of the compute
capacity but full use of the memory. This enables users and applications to grow over time.
• Quick Essbase backup/restore -- don't have to take Essbase down for extended periods
With these attributes, Exalytics fits well into the corporate data center.
Benefit #5: Consolidation
• Given its scalability, multiple instances of Oracle BI can be consolidated into a single instance on
Exalytics. This reduces complexity, administration headaches, and cost.
• A single Exadata Database Machine can consolidate OLTP applications and also host the BI
Applications data warehouse. Cost savings and complexity reductions through consolidation of
independent databases are key reasons customers choose Exadata.
Benefit #6: TCO
So many of the business and technical benefits contribute to lower Total Cost of Ownership. To
review, some of these are:
• Rapid, sure deployment of pre-built BI Applications and Engineered Systems, leading to fast time to
value and earlier accrual of benefits.
• Lower development and deployment costs, due to the pre-built content of BI Applications and
integration with Oracle transactional applications.
• Lower ongoing database administration costs to maintain performance, due to the Exalytics
performance optimizing in-memory technologies.
• Cost savings through environment consolidation. For Exadata, its can combine OLTP and data
warehouse databases on a single Exadata system. For Exalytics, any combination of Oracle BI,
Essbase, and Endeca Information Discovery can run and work together. Individual instances of
Essbase or OBI can be combined into larger single systems.
Conclusion
Investment in analytics is one of the leading priorities for a growing number of organizations. To gain
fact-based insights from data locked in CRM, ERP, HCM and SCM systems, a data warehouse and
effective analytics are required. However, custom building this is risky, slow, and costly.
A better solution is pre-built analytics applications leveraging powerful BI technology all running on
Engineered Systems. This combination is compelling and delivers a long list of business and technical
benefits:
• Increased user satisfaction and adoption due to improved response times
• Faster ETL for shorter load windows and more uptime
• Better user scalability economically satisfies bursty use and enables broad mobile rollouts
Oracle Business Anal ytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle Engineered Systems
23
• Project risk reduction and faster time to value
• Greater interactivity, more self-service, and better visualizations
• “Future proof” against evolving analytic needs
• Pre-integrated solution, saving time, cost, and headaches
• Superior performance with less admin work
• Not limited to the memory on board
• Consolidation
• Lower Total Cost of Ownership
Oracle Business Analytics:
Business Intelligence Applications on Oracle
Engineered Systems
March 2013
Author: Paul Rodwick
Contributing Authors: Robin J Hazel, Mauricio
Alvarado, Rashmi Vittal
Oracle Corporation
World Headquarters
500 Oracle Parkway
Redwood Shores, CA 94065
U.S.A.
Worldwide Inquiries:
Phone: +1.650.506.7000
Fax: +1.650.506.7200
oracle.com
Copyright ©2013, Oracleand/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
This document is provided for information purposes only, and the contents hereof are subject to change without notice. This
document is not warranted to be error-free, nor subject to any other warranties or conditions, whether expressed orally or implied in
law, including implied warranties and conditions of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. We specifically disclaimany
liability with respect to this document, and no contractual obligations are formed either directly or indirectly by this document. This
document may not be reproduced or transmitted in any formor by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any purpose, without our
prior written permission.
Oracle and J ava are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Intel and Intel Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and
are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. AMD, Opteron, the AMD logo, and the AMD Opteron logo are
trademarks or registered trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. 0113
doc_911517037.pdf