1 Introducing Oracle Retail Data Model

What is Oracle Retail Data Model?

Oracle Retail Data Model is a startup kit for implementing a retail business intelligence solution. It is a standards-based data model, designed and pre-tuned for Oracle data warehouses, including the Oracle Exadata Database Machine.

The Oracle Retail Data Model offers a single-vendor solution package that is tightly integrated with the business intelligence platform. With pre-built data mining, Online Analytical Processing (Oracle OLAP) and dimensional models, Oracle Retail Data Model provides you with industry-specific metrics and insights that you can act on immediately to improve your bottom line. These business intelligence solution offerings take advantage of Oracle's scalability and reliability, using Oracle's familiar optimization, parallelism, and performance engineering within the database.

Oracle Retail Data Model is a pre-built, pre-tested solution designed by industry experts to help retailers maximize the value of their Oracle data warehouse. You can take advantage of pre-built and pre-tested solution sets designed by industry experts that deliver relevant insights. Oracle Retail Data Model includes an exhaustive set of embedded advanced analytics using Oracle's OLAP and data mining technology. Using sophisticated trending and data mining capabilities based on Oracle's OLAP and data mining technology, retailers - including restaurants, grocery stores, department stores, specialty store chains, mass merchants, convenience stores, and multi-channel retailers, now have the data analysis capabilities to develop retail-specific insights that are relevant, actionable, and can improve both top-line and bottom-line results. You can see summarized, aggregated information or quickly navigate to drill-down transaction details to better understand business issues.

Oracle Retail Data Model can be used in any application environment and is easily extendable.

By leveraging Oracle's strong retail domain expertise, Oracle Retail Data Model provides an industry standard compliant foundation schema that is modern, relevant, topical, and addresses needs of most retail segments. This normalized foundation schema serves as a detailed and structured representation of the retail business, providing an integrated base for business information with fully defined entities and relationships.

For example, using Oracle Retail Data Model's sample reports, merchandisers gain improved insight into product affinities; loss prevention specialists gain improved visibility; and marketing analysts gain improved understanding of promotional effectiveness and customer segmentation. You can add your own reports as well. Oracle Retail Data Model, combined with Oracle technology, provides all of the components required for a complete and extendable Retail Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence framework to eliminate complex and costly integration requirements, all designed to reduce your total cost of ownership.

With Oracle Retail Data Model, you can jump-start the design and implementation of a retail data warehouse to quickly achieve a positive ROI for your data warehousing and business intelligence project with a predictable implementation effort.

Oracle Retail Data Model reduces costs for both immediate and on-going operations by leveraging out-of-box Oracle based Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence solutions, making world-class database and business intelligence technology solutions available with a retail specific data model.

New Features in Oracle Retail Data Model

This release of Oracle Retail Data Model includes the following changes and new features:

• Support for Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) Operational Data Model Release 6.0

• New database objects added to support the following:

  • Food service transactions, recipe, and reservations

  • Manufacturer's view of items and multiple retailers

  • Retailer private label and business to business sales

  • Retailers: in-store, e-commerce, catalog, wholesale

  • Wholesale franchise customers and stores

  • Point of Service control transactions, Store Financials

  • Invoice, Receivable, Payable, General Ledger, Journal Entries

• New Advanced Analytics, Forecasting, and Prediction

  • Price Elasticity: for more information, see "Model 7: Product Price Elasticity Analysis"

  • Customer Sentiment: for more information, see "Model 12: Customer Sentiment Analysis"

  • Customer Value: for more information, see "Model 10: Customer Life Time Value Analysis"

  • Workforce Optimization: for more information, see "Model 8: Employee Combination Analysis"

• Customer orders support: for more information, see Chapter 9, "Oracle Retail Data Model OLAP Cubes".

• Support for additional measures in all levels, base, derived, aggregate, and new reports covering Retail Math calculations such as Customer Traffic, Conversion Rate, Current Assets/Liabilities, Net Profit/Sales, Number of transactions, Sales per Hour, Sales per Sq Foot, Units per Customer/Txn, and so on.

• Adoption of Oracle Database 11g Release 2 features and capabilities, including:

  • Interval Partition: an extension of range partitioning which instructs the database to automatically create partitions of a specified interval when data inserted into the table exceeds all of the existing range partitions.

  • Improved OLAP provides:

    • New cubes for Activity Requests, Carrier/Vendor Compliance, Customer RFMP, Purchase Order, Employee Label/Wage Payment, Store Hours/Traffic, and Space Utilization.

    • Improved forecast process to perform the forecasts as part of Incremental load (can be scheduled to run every month or as often as required).

    • Supports Query Rewrite of relational star schema based queries using Oracle OLAP functionality Query Rewrite using Cube organized Materialized Views. For more information on Query Rewrite, see Oracle OLAP User's Guide.

  • Reduces the number of materialized views, improves performance, and provides enhanced manageability

  • Improved Mining

• Improved Sample Reports

  • Less operational, more advanced analytics

  • Update-able metadata for impact and lineage analysis

What Are the Components of Oracle Retail Data Model

Oracle Retail Data Model following components:

• Logical model

  Chapter 2, "Logical Data Model of Oracle Retail Data Model" describes the logical data model.

• Physical model

  Chapter 3, "Physical Data Model of Oracle Retail Data Model" describes the physical model. The logical to physical mapping is detailed in Chapter 4, "Logical to Physical Mappings in the Oracle Retail Data Model".

• Intra-ETL database packages and SQL scripts to extract, transform, and load (ETL) data from one layer of Oracle Retail Data Model to another.

  The intra-ETL packages and SQL scripts are described in detail in Chapter 6, "ETL for the Oracle Retail Data Model". How to use these packages and scripts to populate a data warehouse based on the Oracle Retail Data Model is discussed in Oracle Retail Data Model Implementation and Operations Guide.

• OLAP Models for Oracle Retail Data Model

  Chapter 8, "Oracle Retail Data Model OLAP Dimensions" and Chapter 9, "Oracle Retail Data Model OLAP Cubes" describe the OLAP Models.

• Pre-defined Data Mining Models.

  These models are described in detail in Chapter 10, "Data Mining Models in Oracle Retail Data Model". How to create these models is discussed in Oracle Retail Data Model Implementation and Operations Guide.

• Utility Scripts

  The utility scripts are described in Chapter 11, "Oracle Retail Data Model Utility Scripts".

• Sample reports and dashboards

• Installation scripts

  For more information on installation, refer to the Oracle Retail Data Model Installation Guide.

Oracle Products That Make Up Oracle Retail Data Model

Several Oracle technologies are involved in building the infrastructure for retail business intelligence.

Oracle Database with OLAP, Data Mining and Partitioning Option

Oracle Retail Data Model utilizes a complete Oracle technical stack. It leverages the following data warehousing features of the Oracle database: SQL model, compression, partitioning, advanced statistical functions, materialized views, data mining, and online analytical processing (OLAP).

Oracle Development Tools

Use the following Oracle tools to customize the predefined logical and physical models provided with Oracle Retail Data Model, or to populate the target relational tables, materialized views, or OLAP cubes.

Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Presentation Tools

Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition is a comprehensive suite of enterprise Business Intelligence products that delivers a full range of analysis and reporting capabilities. You can use Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Answers and Dashboard presentation tools to customize the predefined dashboard reports that are provided with Oracle Retail Data Model.