Reddit mentions of Building the Data Warehouse

ohh "set things up" is a very very wide term. OBIEE can do a ton of stuff. First do you have a data warehouse? What is the source of your data? I can give you the basics. OBIEE uses a metadata repository its called and RPD this is the source of all queries. You pull metadata from your source and then build out the RPD through a physical -> Business -> Presentation layer. The Business layer can do quite a bit of work for you in terms of combining dimensions and joins but you want as much of a star schema as possible from the source. Read Kimballs book listed below to understand star schema and warehousing concepts.

Inside of the OBI admin tool there is also some user management, user management isa whole nother aspect. Are you using some ldap authentiacaiton or will you be managing users though obiee? There are USERS, GROUPS, & ROLES. This is another aspect to deal with.

There is also the EM web portal, Enterprise Manager from here you do other management of users and roles and the actual services. This is another thing, where is this hosted? Do you already have OBIEE 11g set up on a server? If so you will need access to that box to do services management. Also may need to modify config files here.

Then there is the actual reporting service, OBIEE uses dimensions and a fact to create charts, pivot tables etc. Here you will log into the web front end this would be accessed by going to http://servername:port/analytics From here you log in as your development user by default its weblogic i beileve. And here is where you would create dashboards etc.

This is just one aspect of the tool set, there is also BIP (bi publisher) used to develop reports from various sources by creating a template and filling the template out by using XML.

Oracle offers classes, which if your managment is throwing you into OBIEE they should be giving you at least 1 class. The report building stuff is easy enough to pick up, but if you are responsible for the management of the server, you need a class.. there is just so much to know about it.

I have worked in the RPD and reports/dashboard building side of things for 2 years. and im still learning stuff (usually the limitations of OBIEE). We have a whole nother TEAM(TEAM) of people who manage the databases and server side.

Resources:

Get a subscription to METALINK from oracle to issue service requests and look up bug fixes etc.

https://login.oracle.com/mysso/signon.jsp

Blogs:

http://www.rittmanmead.com/
http://gerardnico.com/

There are also youtube videos to explain simple stuff for setting up and RPD etc. You can also download an entire sample setup of OBIEE 11g from oracle.. its a huge download 50gb or something like that, but it has database, RPD, sample reports. all in a virtual machine. You can spend a week setting it up just to have examples to work from.

There is plenty of resources, but to give 1 generalized resource is difficult, you need to search for specific things you need to do. "Installing obiee11g on linux" "importing meta data into RPD"

If you need books on Data Warehousing and explanations of STAR schema and data denormalization I suggest reading up on kimball method:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Data-Warehouse-Toolkit-Dimensional/dp/1118530802/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377213718&sr=8-1&keywords=kimball

and

Inmon

http://www.amazon.com/Building-Data-Warehouse-W-Inmon/dp/0764599445/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1377213827&sr=8-2&keywords=inmon

They have different philosophies for data warehousing i personally subscribe to the Kimball method because it supports rapid development better.


I'd like you to know but not discourage you, this is a large undertaking for 1 person. We manage 2 RPD's and 2 sets of dashboards for a custom reporting application we also do the ETL and warehousing. The whole warehouse was set up by a team, then we moved in ETL is handled by another team of people and we have a team doing reporting, then there is management and functional. So building out an OBIEE implementation from the ground up doing warehousing is a huge undertaking. There is another team of people doing server management and upgrades, and migrations.

This is at least a 3 man job, with each person being specialized. Push for RPD traning, Server managment Traning, and dashboard design Training. Warehousing methods and ETL work is another story.

If you plan to read Kimball, I recommend that you read Inmon as well like Building the Data Warehouse. It will give you another point of view. While Kimball focuses on the usability for queries (front-end), Inmon focuses more on making the clean integration of data sources (back-end).

If you have a lot of time you can look for the Data Vault structure. The approach uses a very granular modelization. My point of view is that it is too much modeling work and slow to query. It seems overkill to me but you can make your own judgment.

The Data Lake notion is probably overkilled as well for you but good to know. The idea is that you dump every data you have in a low-cost data store (Hadoop usually) before processing it.

You can also read my point of view here. It's basically taking ideas from all of those within a simple and agile framework.