Top 20 OBIEE Interview Questions and Answers

1. Mention what is OBIEE?

Obiee stands for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE). It is a business intelligence system for the enterprise that delivers abilities for reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), ad hoc query and analysis dashboards, and scorecards.

2. Mention what are the features of OBIEE?

Key features of OBIEE includes,

1. Hierarchy Drilling
2. Scheduled Report Generation
3. Graphical Reporting (Charts, Pivots, Gauges, )
4. Ad Hoc Analysis
5. Global support and development capability

3. Mention what is end to end lifecycle OBIEE?

The end to end life cycle of OBIEE is,

1. Collecting Business Requirements
2. Identify source systems
3. Design ETL to load data to the Data Warehouse
4. Creating repository
5. Create dashboards and reports
6. Setting up security (LDAP or External table)
7. Decide on aggregations or caching mechanism based on performance
8. Testing and QA.

4. Explain how OBIEE architecture works?

OBIEE architecture works in following way,

1. A request is made by the Users and sent to the Presentation Server.
2. The Presentation Server transforms the request into logical SQL and sent to the BI server.
3. The BI server transforms logical SQL into physical SQL and sent it to the database
4. The result gets back to the user through the same path

5. Compare OBIEE and Tableau?

Criteria	OBIEE	Tableau
Ease of  use	Needs Trained developers	Empowers and users
Data vizualization	Average	Excellent
Enterprice Reporting	Easy to deploy and manage	Much harder

 

6. How will you create Interactive Dashboards?

By clicking on Administration and Manage dashboards and by adding column selector we can create interactive Dashboard.

7. What is write back in Obiee?

We can give a column as updatable and then view the reports, this option is called writeback option.

8. How will execute Direct SQL in OBIEE?

By clicking Direct Database Request below the subject area in we can execute Direct SQL in OBIEE.

 9. How OBIEE Developer can create a report from two support area?

From the Criteria Pane of the Report Created from First Subject Area
come to the bottom of the page and click combine request. By this we can create a report from two subject areas.

10. How can port changes for dashboard, reports, rpd from development to production?

For the RPD we can use the Merge option in Admin Tool and for dashboards and reports we can use Content Accelerator Framework.

11. How will go about additional column to the repository in the presentation layer?

Check if the table is already existing if so add in physical layer, then click on BMM and then Presentation layer, then reload server metadata, then it will be visible to all users.

12.What is Authentication? How many types of authentication.

Authentication is the procedure by which a system confirms, through the use of a user

• Operating system authentication.
• External table authentication.
• Database authentication.
• LDAP authentication

13. How will you enable or disable caching at the system level and table level?

In the NQSConfig.ini file use ENABLE under CACHE Section for System Level
For tables, if we want to enable the cache at table level, open the repository in offline mode This should be different from the current repository and click enable or disable the cache.

14. What are the different types of joints that are possible in OBIEE RPD?

1. Complex Join –it uses multiple conditions, such as A.ROW_WID = B.ROW_WID AND / OR A.A_WID = B.B_WID
2. Natural Join
3. How does Seibel Architecture works? Explain three layers.

15. There are five parts of Siebel Architecture.

1. Performance
2. Data sources.
3. Siebel Analytics Web Server data sources.
4. Siebel analytics scheduler.
5. Siebel analytics server

Metadata represents the analytical Model which is created using the siebel Analytics Administration tool.

16. Repository divided into three layer

1. Physical –Signifies the Data Sources.
2. Business –copies the Data sources into Facts and Dimension.
3. Presentation –Specifies the user’s view of the model; rendered in Siebel answer.
4. Why do we have multiple LTS in BTM Layer? What is the purpose?

 To improve the performance and query response time we have multiple LTS in BMM.

17. How we can identify the dimension tables and how we can decide them during the business/Data modelling?

Dimension tables contain descriptions about data analysts which is used as query in the database. Every table contains a primary key that contains one or more columns; each row in a table is uniquely identified by its primary-key value or values.

18. Explain Query respiratory tool?

 It is utility of OBIEE /Seibel Admin tool.

Allows us to examine the repository metadata tool.

It Examine the relationship between metadata objects like which column in the presentation layer maps to which table in physical layer1`For example: search for objects based on name, type.

19. How can you bypass Seibel analytics server security?

It can by-passed by setting authentication type in NQSCONFIG file in the security section as:authentication_type=bypass_nqs.instanceconfig.xml and nqsconfig.ini are the 2 places.

20. Explain Oracle Business intelligence application?

An Oracle BI application consists of pre-built, industry-specific Oracle BI interactive dashboards and Oracle BI reports that are built using industry best practices and address key functional areas within an organization. Oracle BI applications are integrated with operational applications to provide business metrics in reports, in context with an organization’s business function and industry.
Oracle BI applications include Extract Transform Load (ETL) routines to extract, transform, and load data into the Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse.

• Security in Oracle BI:
  OBIEE allows a high degree of control over access to elements in Oracle BI applications. The security mechanism comprises Business logic object security, Presentation Catalog object security and Data level security.
• Drilling Down in Oracle BI:
  In OBIEE, you can drill down from a dashboard or report to an actual item in the database. For example, if you work in sales, you can drill down to the city level within a sales report, and observe that there is a large sale pending in Paris. If you are using an Oracle Siebel operational application, you can then drill down on the pending sale and go directly to that opportunity in the Oracle BI application.