Recently, I came across OBIEE. This is an Oracle tool that is created to support OLAP – type investigation into a database. I have to confess: I am impressed with it. The first great thing for me as an analyst is that it closely integrated into existing Oracle tool. One may continue to use the Oracle SQL Developer, the data are stored in an Oracle database. So one really extends the usage of existing tools.
Moreover, the tool is relative easy to work with.
To show how easy it is is to work with, I created a small model having two dimensions and one fact table. One dimension is related to date. It has four levels: date, month, year and total. The metadata can be inserted in Analytic Workspace Manager. In that tool, we seen the possibility to add additional dimensions. As attributes, we have to include the levels, the hierarchies and the mappings to an existing table. See the screenshot below:
In that screenshot from the Analytic Workspace Manager, one might see three columns: a column where the logical entities/attributes of OLAP are mentioned, with their cubes, facts and dimensions. One has a column in the middle where the value for each of the logical entities/attributes are given. And one has a column on the right where the link is created between the physical tables and the logical/attributes is provided.
How to fill out such values can be found here.
In a similar fashion, one could create a cube that connects facts and dimensions. See the screenshot below.
But this is not all: SQL Developer now has a subset of the functionalities that allow you to maintain these cubes as well. I started out with changing some values in the underlying tables. I was able to load these data in the cube. I must say: a very nice accomplishment from that tool. SQL Developer is yet able to support you adequately if you want o create a new cube. For that task, SQL Developer is no intuively enough. But to maintain an existing cube is perfectly possible with SQL Developer.