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?
Download the brochure for this service offering:
Download the brochure for this service offering:
Why inlumi?
We enable our customers to make informed decisions to get ahead of the competition.
inlumi provides an end-to-end EPM capability, which helps clients with all aspects of EPM and BI – including advisory, applications and managed services for Financial Close, Budgeting & Forecasting and Management Reporting.
We support clients with our expertise to bring leading practices and predictable outcomes. All our consultants have a finance background and speak the language of Controllers and CFOs.
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