1. Give a brief introduction of OBIEE?

Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (sometimes simply referred to as Oracle Business Intelligence) provides
a full range of business intelligence capabilities that allow you to:

Collect up-to-date data from your organization

Present the data in easy-to-understand formats (such as tables and graphs)

Deliver data in a timely fashion to the employees in your organization

2. What Is the Oracle BI Presentation Catalog?
The Oracle BI Presentation Catalog stores the objects, such as analyses, dashboards, and KPIs, that
you and other users create using Oracle BI EE. Users have their own personal folder (My Folders),
where they can store the objects that they create. The objects in a personal folder can be accessed
only by the user who created and saved the content into that folder. Users can add sub-folders to their
personal folders to organize their content in the way that is the most logical to them.
You can also store objects in shared folders where other users or groups can access the objects. A
combination of business logic security,catalog object security, and data level security determines who
has the ability to view data and objects, edit objects, and delete objects from the catalog. Your
administrator creates and maintains the catalogs shared folder structure.
3. What is OBIEE 11G?
Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) 11g is the most significant release of OBIEE
since 2006.
4. Explain the main features of OBIEE 11G?

Oracle Business Intelligence is now more integrate with the Oracle Fusion Middleware
software family.

Oracle WebLogic Server replaces Oracle Application Server and Oracle Containers for Java
(OC4J).

Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Installer replaces the installer that was used in previous
versions of Oracle Business Intelligence. It can perform software installation and configuration
steps in the same process or separately in their own processes

This release add the following administration command-line utilities:

Oracle WebLogic Server scripting tool (WLST) for managing the Oracle WebLogic
Server domain.

OPMN and the opmnctl commands for the Oracle Process Manager and Notification
Server.

A database repository must be created before installation of the components with

the Repository Creation Utility (RCU) tool
Log centralization via the web log viewer
In addition, Oracle Business Intelligence is now deployed in a clustered configuration by default.
Because of this, the default ODBC DSN for the Oracle BI Server points to the Cluster Controller by
default, rather than to the Oracle BI Server

5. Explain Oracle Business Intelligence Applications?

An Oracle BI application consists of pre-built, industry-specific Oracl e BI interactive dashboards and
Oracle BI reports that are built using industry best practices and address key functional areas within
an organization. Oracle BI applications are integrated with operational applications to provide
business metrics in reports, in context with an organizations business function and industry.
Oracle BI applications include Extract Transform Load (ETL) routines to extract, transform, and load
data into the Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse.

Security in Oracle BI:

OBIEE allows a high degree of control over access to elements in Oracle BI applications. The
security mechanism comprises Business logic object security, Presentation Catalog object security
and Data level security.

Drilling Down in Oracle BI:

In OBIEE, you can drill down from a dashboard or report to an actual item in the database. For
example, if you work in sales, you can drill down to the city level within a sales report, and observe
that there is a large sale pending in Paris. If you are using an Oracle Siebel operational application,
you can then drill down on the pending sale and go directly to that opportunity in the Oracle BI
application.
6. Define repository in terms of OBIEE?
Repository stores the Meta data information.The extension of the repository file is .rpd.With OBIEE
Server, all the rules needed for security,data modeling, aggregate navigation, caching, and
connectivity is stored in metadata repositories. Each metadata repository can store multiple business
models. OBIEE Server can access multiple repositories
Repository is divided into three layer,

Physical Represents the data Sources

Business model the Data sources into Facts and Dimension and apply business logic

Presentation Specifies the users view of the data rendered in OBIEE answers client
7. What is the end to end life cycle of OBIEE?

OBIEE life cycle:

Gather Business Requirements

Identify source systems

Design ETL to load data to the Data Warehouse

Build a repository

Build dashboards and reports

Define security (LDAP or External table)

Based on performance, decide on aggregations and/or caching mechanism.

Testing and QA.

8. What is the purpose of Alias Tables?

An Alias table is a physical table with the type of Alias. It is a reference to a physical table, and
inherits all its column definitions and some properties from the physical table. A logical table source
shows how the logical objects are mapped to the physical layer and can be mapped to physical tables,
stored procedures and select statements. An alias table can be a reference to any of these logical table
source types.
Alias Tables can be an important part of designing a physical layer. The following is a list of the main
reasons to create an alias table:

To reuse an existing table more than once in your physical layer (without having to import it
several times)
To set up multiple alias tables, each with different keys, names, or joins
To help you design sophisticated star or snowflake structures in the business model layer.
Alias tables are critical in the process of converting ER Schems to Dimensional Sachems.
9. What is Authentication? How many types of authentication do we have in OBIEE?
Authentication is the process by which a system verifies a user with the help of a user ID and
password. It checks if user has the necessary permissions and authorizations to log in and access data.
There are 4 main types of Authentication in OBIEE:

Operating system authentication

External table authentication

Database authentication

LDAP authentication
10. What is aggregate navigation? How do you configure the Aggregate tables in OBIEE?
Aggregate tables store pre-computed results, which are measures that have been aggregated (typically
summed) over a set of dimensional attributes. Using aggregate tables is a very popular technique for
speeding up query response times in decision support systems.
Ex: If you observe that most of the queries are fired on aggregated values like yearly or monthly
data rather that day level data then to speed up the report we can create an aggregate table containing
month level and year level data and map it to the respective logical table and set the aggregation
levels in the content tab of LTS.

11. Difference between a session and repo variable?

Session variables are similar to dynamic repository variables in that they obtain their values from
initialization blocks. Unlike dynamic repository variables, however, the initialization of session
variables is not scheduled. When a user begins a session, the Oracle BI Server creates new instances
of session variables and initializes them.
A repository variable has a single value at any point in time. Repository variables can be used instead
of literals or constants in Expression Builder in the Administration Tool. The Oracle BI Server
substitutes the value of the repository variable for the variable itself in the metadata.
Unlike a repository variable, there are as many instances of a session variable as there are active
sessions on the Oracle BI Server. Each instance of a session variable could be initialized to a different
value.
12. What kind of sources can be connected to OBIee ?
OBIee can be plugged on Relational Databases, Cubes or Flat files, with the following constraints :
The sources must be modeled as star schemas or snowflakes schemas in order to have an efficient
and safe behavior.
In case of multiple sources directly in OBIee used together, be aware that OBIee will conduct the
needed joins itself, and OBIee is not a database.