BI for Retail

Currently (R13) there are at least 4 offerings related to Business Intelligence for Oracle Retail:

• Daily Business Intelligence for Retail, part of the Oracle eBusiness Financials suite.
• Oracle Retail Data Model (ORDM, Apr-2009)
  formerly known as Oracle Data Warehouse for Retail (ODW-R), or Oracle Retail Business Intelligence Accelerator (ORBIA)
• Oracle Retail Data Warehouse (RDW)
• Oracle Retail Analytics (Future)

Also see the Video Question & Answer by Armand Nelson and Dave Boyce on this very subject.

What are the aspects of these products that are relevant for making a choice?
OOW08 presentation by David Dorf (cboracle / oraclec6) summarizes it all.

Oracle Daily Business Intelligence for Retail

Oracle Retail RMS integration with EBS Whitepaper ("Oracle Retail E-Business Suite Integration Guide" Metalink Note 458221.1):"
"Oracle Daily Business Intelligence is a prebuilt decision support system for Oracle Applications. The solution has been extended to include integrated data sourced directlyfrom Oracle Retail, with extension for customers to view Daily Business Intelligence for accounts payable, sales, and expenses."

Oracle Retail Data Model (ORDM)

ORDM is built on a combination/choice of PLSQL and OWB.

It may require the OLAP database option, the Datamining Database option depending on the functionality that the retailer likes to implement.

ORDM as a product/license does not come with a reporting/presentation layer, however OBI-EE metadata for several functional and tested sample reports is delivered with the installer.

Formerly known as Oracle Data Warehouse for Retail (ODW-R) or Oracle Retail Business Intelligence Accelerator (OR-BIA)

Launched in April 2009 for GA.

Here some older links from before being launched as ORDM:

• http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/html/itp/oracle_SMA_US_EN_WP_Anderson.pdf
• OOW05 (not available any longer) Oracle Retail Business Intelligence Accelerator and ABC Stores in Hawaii, alternative
• OOW07 Oracle’s Approach to Industry Data Warehousing in Retail
• OOW08 Discover More Insight with Oracle Data Warehouse for Retail
• OOW08 Unlocking Insight with Integration and Business Intelligence
  
• Collaborate08 Oracle Datawarehouse for Retail
• Oracle Corp
  • Accelerating Retail Business Intelligence (Whitepaper Sep-2005)
  • http://www.oracle.com/applications/retail/bi/bus_int_accel.html

Oracle Retail Data Warehouse (RDW)

This is the classical OracleRetail datawarehouse (RDW), formerly using MicroStrategy as a reporting front end but from R13 based on OBIEE+. A custom Java engine, RETL, is used for both the extracts from RMS etc. and the loading and transformation into the datawarehouse. Oracle Retail Data Warehouse can be integrated with Oracle Retail Workspace.

Oracle Retail Analytics

See OOW08 http://www28.cplan.com/cbo_export/208/PS_S299372_299372_208-1_v1.pdf p.20
This product is still in the design phase and is not yet released.

Conclusion

RDW 13.0 is the current GA product, and 13.1 is under development. There are tenative plans to port RDW to Exadata (data warehouse appliance), but nothing has been announced.