Case Studies

Oracle Database 12c now includes property graphs, a great feature to analyze relationships in your data, such as finding the most influential people in a social network or discovering patterns of fraud in financial transactions. 

Graph analysis can do things that the relational model can’t do – or can’t do without very complicated queries and expensive table joins.  For someone who has never touched a property graph before it can be a little intimidating to get started.  It doesn’t help that most examples seem to start big and kind of assume that you already know what you are doing.  So for the people who are interested in exploring the new property graph functionality of the Oracle Database but don’t have a clue how to get started I thought it would be helpful to put an example together that assumes you don’t know anything.

OBIEE is an integration of several pieces of technology that creates an enterprise grade scalable platform for delivering business analytics.  Because of the capabilities of OBIEE, people with no programming skills can create rich and complex visualizations using just the base functionality of the product.   

When organizations do need special visualizations that can’t be accomplished with OBIEE’s delivered visualizations there can be a tendency to turn to other technology stacks because of the perception that either OBIEE isn’t easy to integrate or that using JavaScript libraries, like D3, within OBI will make it harder to upgrade the OBI in the future.   

The proliferation of open source technologies for visualizing data in recent years has made it far easier for organizations to build rich and dynamic visualizations targeted at specific analytics needs that simply are not available inside of purchased applications.   

OBI provides a number of key capabilities that are difficult, expensive and time consuming to reproduce.  Some of those capabilities include: a scalable webserver with performance and logging capabilities that has 24/7 worldwide support, the capability to query and federate hundreds of different data sources and create a reusable and extensible business metadata layer, security services that can concurrently integrate with multiple corporate identity management systems and extend that security to row level results, and an analytics deployment mechanism that already extends across the organization.   

Given a business case where (Gasp!) OBIEE can’t provide the needed functionality out of the box how can an organization take advantage of functionality that OBIEE provides and still satisfy their internal requirements?