What Is Oracle BI Beans?
Business intelligence has become the focal point for all corporations and organizations! Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Beans enables the rapid development of high-value business intelligence applications, which fully leverage the Oracle technology platform. BI Beans provides a secure and scalable platform for increased developer productivity. It allows developers to quickly and easily design, build, and deploy highly advanced analytic applications that provide compelling reports and information sharing among users.

Increased Developer Productivity
Developers today are always looking for solutions that allow quick, easy, and robust development. The aim is to reuse components as much as possible. With BI Beans, both application developers and business users can benefit from the rapid development and deployment of BI solutions.
BI Beans is a set of standards-based J2EE, customizable components that can be used with any integrated development environment. Using BI Beans within Oracle JDeveloper significantly enhances and simplifies the developer experience by providing a new approach to wizards, comprehensive tag libraries, live access to data, flexible deployment options, and ease of integration.

Highly Advanced Analytic Power
BI Beans allows developers and business users to easily tap into the analytic functions in the embedded OLAP engine of the Oracle database, using two very important tools: Query Builder and Calculation Builder.

The patented Query Builder uses business terms and definitions that allow both developers and users to quickly and easily construct complicated queries. Query Builder in BI Beans supports all of the functions that business intelligence users are accustomed to, such as ranking and exception tools.

At times, users want to define new business indicators for analysis, for example, a sales variance percentage based on projected and actual sales figures. Calculation Builder in BI Beans allows users to quickly and easily create analytic calculations by using templates-driven wizards.

Compelling Reports
Data must be presented in a format that allows users to identify trends and abnormalities. BI Beans provides graph and crosstab components, which enable any user within an organization to produce high quality reports.

There are over 70 graph types included with BI Beans, including common graph types such as line, bar, and area, as well as specialized graph types such as bubble, radar, and stock. This allows the developer and user to select the appropriate graph type to support the needs of displaying and analyzing different business data. These graphs are extensible and completely customizable to satisfy different usage scenarios.

The BI Beans' crosstab offers a multidimensional view of data and provides services such as drilling and pivoting, and powerful data-driven formatting. Crosstabs are completely customizable and extensible through the availability of open APIs and interfaces. Conditional and stoplight formatting can be defined with a simple dialog.

Information Sharing
Working in teams and sharing reports are common activities. BI Beans applications have built-in support for information sharing through the BI Beans Catalog.

The BI Beans Catalog is used to save, retrieve, and manage all developer and user-defined analytical objects, such as reports, graphs, favorite queries, and calculated measures. The BI Beans Catalog organizes objects into folders and provides access control at both the folder and object levels. To make sharing more convenient, you can also create and distribute shortcuts to folders and objects.

Availability

BI Beans is available on the Oracle Business Intelligence Tools for Windows CD. It is an extension of Oracle JDeveloper, so before you install BI Beans, you must install Oracle JDeveloper.