The BI Beans provide reusable components that are the basic building blocks for OLAP decision support applications. Using the BI Beans, developers can rapidly develop and deploy new applications, because these large functional units have already been developed and tested — not only for their robustness, but also for their ease of use. And because the BI Beans provide a common look and feel to OLAP applications, the learning curve for end users is greatly reduced.
The BI Beans contain the following:
■ Presentation Beans display the data in a rich variety of formats so that trends and variations can easily be detected. Among the Presentation Beans currently available are Graph, Table, and Crosstabs.
■ Data Beans acquire and manipulate the data. The Data Beans use the OLAP API to connect to a data source, define a query, manipulate the resultant data set, and return the results to the Presentation Beans for display. Data Beans include a Query Builder and a Calculation Builder.
■ Persistence Services is a set of packages that support the storage and retrieval of objects in the BI Beans Catalog, not only so that you can save your work, but also so that you can share the work with others who have access to the Catalog.
Note: Oracle JDeveloper is an application and is not packaged with the Oracle RDBMS.
The BI Beans can be implemented as a Java client or a thin client. Java clients best support users who do immersed analyses, that is, use the system for extensive periods of time with a lot of interaction. For example, users who create reports benefit from a Java client. Thin clients best support remote users who use a low bandwidth connection and have basic analytical needs. Thin clients can be embedded in a portal or other Web site for these users.
Metadata
The OLAP API and the BI Beans use the OLAP Catalog to provide the information they need about multidimensional objects defined in an Oracle data warehouse, such as measures and dimensions. The BI Beans generates additional metadata to support its additional functionality. This additional metadata is called the BI Beans Catalog.
Navigation
The Presentation Beans support navigation techniques such as drilling, pivoting, and paging.
■ Drilling displays lower-level values that contribute to a higher-level aggregate, such as the cities that contribute to a state total.
■ Pivoting rotates the data cube so that the dimension members that labeled a series now label groups, or the dimension members that labeled columns in a crosstab now label rows instead. For example, if products label the rows and regions label the columns, then you can pivot the data cube so that products label the columns and regions label the rows.
■ Paging handles additional dimensions by showing each member in a separate graph, crosstab, or table rather than nesting them in the columns or rows. For example, you might want to see each time period in a separate graph rather than all time periods on the same graph.
Formatting
The Presentation Beans enable you to change the appearance of a particular display.
In addition, the values of the data itself can affect the format.
■ Number formatting. Numerical displays can be modified by changing their scale, number of decimal digits and leading zeros, currency symbol, negative notation, and so forth. Currency symbols and scaling factors can be displayed in the column or row headers rather than in the cells.
■ Stoplight formatting. The formatting of the cell background color, border, font, and so forth can be data driven so that outstanding or problematic results stand out visually from the other data values.
■ Ranking. In ranking reports, the numerical rank of each dimension value, based on the value of the measure, is displayed.
Graphs
The Graph bean presents data in a large selection of two- and three-dimensional business chart types, such as bar, area, line, pie, ring, scatter, bubble, pyramid, and stock market. Many of the 2D graphs can be displayed as clustered, stacked, dual-Y, percentage, horizontal, vertical, or 3D effect.
Bar, line, and area graphs can be combined so that individual rows in the data cube can be specified as one of these graph types. You can also assign marker shape and type, data line type, color, and width, and fill colors on a row-by-row basis.
The graph image can be copied to the system clipboard and exported in GIF and other image formats.
Users can zoom in and out of selected areas of a graph. They can also scroll across the axes.
Crosstabs
The Crosstab bean presents data in a two-dimensional grid similar to a spreadsheet.
Multiple dimensions can be nested along the rows or columns, and additional dimensions can appear as separate pages. Among the available customizations are:
Font style, size, color and underlining; individual cell background colors; border formats; and text alignment.
Users can navigate through the data using either a mouse or the keyboard. They can insert rows and columns to display totals, and edit cells for what-if analysis.
Tables
The Table bean presents data in record format like a relational table or view. In contrast to the crosstab, the table display handles measures individually rather than as members of a measure dimension. Thus, each measure can be manipulated individually.