BI for the Masses - is here! (BI SE1)

Ever thought what you could get for $5,000? Five thousand dollars? Apart from a year's worth of mortgage payments on my apartment (and that would also change depending on the currency rate fluctuations - mind you my loan is rupee denominated, I am just getting a bit carried away with this analogy), I can think of Oracle Business Intelligence. Yes. Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Standard Edition One is now available for download from OTN. Let's just call it BI SE1 and forget for a minute all the branding and marketing people who may get very, very angry with me for messing up with the branding of the product (there are others also who I may piss off, but अब किसे याद रखूँ और किसे भूलूं, आख़िर दुनिया भर का ठेका तो नहीँ लिया है मैने|)।

OK, so BI SE1 is available for download from OTN। I already said that, didn't I? Right. Where can you get it? From the OTN download page, where else? Here.
And just what exactly does this BI SE1 package contain? The kitchen sink, almost.

• Oracle Database Standard Edition One (version 10.2)
• Oracle Warehouse Builder (core ETL only) (version 10.2)
• Oracle Business Intelligence Answers (version 10.1.3.2.1)
  
• Oracle Business Intelligence Dashboard
• Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher
• Oracle Business Intelligence Server
• Oracle Business Intelligence Server Administrator
  

Each of these products is best-in-class, mind you. The Oracle Database, of course. Oracle Warehouse Builder is recognized as a leader among ETL tools. And BI Suite Enterprise Edition is a big reason why so many analysts, including Gartner, have recognized Oracle as a leader in BI Platforms. BI Publisher is a world class, performant, scalable, and mighty easy to use enterprise class reporting product. So there!

And what did I mean by the $5000 figure? I was lying, to be truthful. BI SE1 is licensed at $1000 per user, with a minimum of five users. So that means that the actual pricing for the entire kitchen sink is $1000!! But of course you would want to share the wonders of this product with more than just one user, right? Of course you would!

To download the product, go to this link


There are two tiny files that need to be downloaded. How tiny are we talking? Oh, just about 2.9GB (3,073,149,672 bytes to be precise). That shall take some time.


While you wait for these tiny files to download, you may want to check the doc library for this suite. That would be this link.


As you would see, apart from the regular doc on the Oracle Database, Oracle Warehouse Builder, and Oracle BI Publisher, there is one doc introducing BI SE1, and a bunch of tutorials.


Click the 'Getting Started' tab, and there are at least two other links of interest:

• Business Intelligence Standard Edition One Install Guide (HTML, PDF)
• Business Intelligence Standard Edition One Tutorial (HTML, PDF). The tutorial is a 226 page document that covers all topics you would expect, like how to setup the tutorial data mart, the BI repository, how to analyze data, publish reports, create Dashboards)
  

More tutorials are hosted on OTN here.

• Creating Interactive Dashboards and Using Oracle Business Intelligence Answers
• Creating a Repository Using the Oracle Business Intelligence Administration Tool
• Installing the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition on Windows
• Using Oracle OLAP With Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition
• Integrating Oracle BI Publisher with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition
• Sending Alerts Using Oracle Business Intelligence Delivers (Delivers is not part of BI SE1, but a little knowledge can't hurt, can it?)