Version User Scope of changes
May 15 2009, 3:35 PM EDT (current) ErikYkema 69 words added, 11 words deleted
Apr 28 2009, 2:55 PM EDT ErikYkema 48 words added, 7 words deleted

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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 directlyfromdirectlyfrom Oracle Retail, with extension for customers to view Daily Business Intelligence for accounts payable, sales, and expenses."

Oracle Retail Data Model (ORDM)

Also
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)

LaunchedinapressreleaseApril2009,seeOracleRetailOTNforum.Launched in April 2009 for GA.

Here some older links from before being launched as ORDM:

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.
Both RDW and ODW-RORDM are(ODW-R)are available and which one is best depends on the situation.
Retail Analytics is a future product built on the BI Applications platform (formerly from Siebel).

An issue with the ODW-RORDM is that the extraction part is missing, i.e. not delivered out of the box, so either some extra ETL layer from RETL extracts to ODW-RORDM staging format is needed, or (through an Oracle partner, e.g. Praxis-Softek) one needs to custom build the source extraction layer. This can be a nice opportunity for applying state of the art extraction principles (asynchronous CDC on DB 10gR1 and later e.g.) and superseeding the limited RETL mechanism.

The DBI-R is just a small extension re. RMS/ReIM/ReSA as a data source.