Oracle Business Intelligence Implementation – Quality Assurance

Oracle Business Intelligence Implementation

Quality Assurance

Oracle Business Intelligence Implementation

Quality Assurance

During the lifetime of an Oracle Business Intelligence platform, a number of projects and developers are involved in the development efforts over a long period of time. Once the implementation is well under way, or when the implementation has reached a stable structure, it is essential to take a step back and take a holistic look at the implementation to make sure that everything is built according to best practices and in a sound way. An OBIEE implementation should be a well-architected solution and not an aggregation of spot solutions and workarounds.

This list of QA items can also be used in a preparatory phase as an architecture guideline, where the input of seasoned OBIEE developers is valuable.

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Area of investigation:

Processes

Development environment

Having a well-maintained development solution ensures development speed and quality:

Use of Multi User Development environment
Use of source control for development artifacts
Environment backup
Developer onboarding process
Development & test data quality

Audit

It’s important to have an audit baseline:

Is Usage Tracking turned on?
Is the usage tracking used for environment health status?
Is the usage tracking used to delete unused dashboards?
Is the usage tracking used for regulatory audits?
Are the dashboards and analyses designed in a way that makes it possible to precisely audit who looked at sensitive data?

Deployment process

Many organisations employ separation of duties so that developers don’t have access to production data. This requires developers to hand over newly developed dashboards to an operations team, and any new development should be properly documented.

Deployment release packaging
Deployment release documentation
Ops team scanning of deployment package for malicious JavaScript code (so called supply chain attack)

Area of investigation:

Technical implementation

Dashboards and analyses

A dashboard is made up of a multitude of prompts and analyses. Front end developers need to adhere to naming standards and structural standards in order to keep the web catalog clean and well maintained.

Naming conventions
Folder structure
User access audit: Who can see what?
Query efficiency: Joins, subqueries or unions?
Dashboard design and usability
Inter dashboard navigation
Contextual documentation: Do the dashboards explain the data to the end user? Does the end user have to find the documentation in Confluence or SharePoint?

Platform

Checking the health of the hosting platform is vital.

User authentication: MSAD, WebLogic, bespoke?
Server hard disk space
Server RAM
Java Virtual Machine RAM usage
Clear OBIEE logs of admin passwords

Repository

The data model repository (RPD) is at the core of OBIEE. Developing the RPD requires extensive knowledge of OBIEE, and it is easy to make mistakes. The following things should pass QA:

The only acceptable warning in the Admin Tool consistency check should be “The features in Database do not match the defaults”.
Adherence to Oracle best practices.
Data model business beauty: Has the data model been expressed in understandable business terms?
Subject Area security audit: Who has access to various subject areas?
Row level security audit: How are data restrictions implemented?
Use of session variables: Are session variables used in an appropriate manner?
Data model layout: Isolated tables, star schema or snowflake?

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