Shuaib.PK

After attending the course on Oracle BI... I realize that its something very easy.

You don't need to be an Einstien to understand BI. Its just another way of modelling your databases, so that it can perform better for "ANALYSIS", instead of "TRANSACTIONS". Maybe you don't need all the investments to buy BI tools if you learn the art of modelling your OLTP data into OLAP models. (Maybe). But ofcourse... these tools do have some advantages as well.

The core of the process is ETL. (EXPORT data from your Transactional DB, TRANSFORM it into a different format like maybe remove KF relations and then LOAD it into a new table for analysis). If we perform this process in Relational database (as a design concept) then we might not be needing expensive and resource hungry BI tools.

Similarly, we can program triggers and stored procedures to build and maintain aggregate tables as well as hiararchy tables. There is no rocket science in building these tables as an off-hours scheduled job. Once these tables are built, we can use them for our reports.

Fine, I agree, Oracle BI has nice drag&drop interface to add facts and diemensions to report. But... How many times do we use it in an application's lifecycle ? Maybe only in initial days of the project. I am advocating that we can reduce the cost by using traditional reporting tools on "Analysis-ready" data.

Once we know what are Dimensions and Facts, we can program them traditional relational database environment. Maybe "complex joins" is a new invention of Oracle BI. But again, these complex joins are based on data of base tables. We can handle them in the form of 1-1 and 1-N joins.

So, WHY spend money on BI tools?