Oracle Fusion Technical: Reports, Data, Integrations and Extensions · Module 3 · The reporting stack: which tool answers which question
Subject areas versus tables
Lesson 24 of 177 · 2 min
OTBI reads a CURATED MODEL. BI Publisher can read almost anything. That is the technical difference, and everything else follows from it. A subject area is a designed set of facts and dimensions with the joins already made, the security already applied, and the attributes named in business language. Somebody at Oracle decided what belongs in it and how it connects, which is exactly what makes it usable by a person who does not know the data model. THE CURATED ONE IS USUALLY RIGHT, for three reasons that are easy to undervalue: the joins are correct, so nobody accidentally multiplies a total by joining one-to-many; the data security is applied, so the analysis shows each reader their own rows; and the names mean something, so an analysis is readable six months later by somebody who did not build it. The specific cases where it cannot answer are worth memorising, because…
The full lesson is part of the course
The video, the complete written lesson and the module quiz are included in Oracle Fusion Technical: Reports, Data, Integrations and Extensions, with a certificate on completion and a fourteen-day refund window.