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Sunday 10 March 2013

Performance Tuning and Financial Analytics


In the past I’ve written and presented on OBI performance from the ‘before perspective’:before you begin development, what are the things you should plan on and how should you implement them.  This paper however is with the ‘after perspective’; what to do if you are stuck with a performance problem that you need to solve quickly.  It will use the Financial Analytics (All versions) application from Oracle’s BI Applications (aka the BI Apps) to walk through a plan of attack and demonstrate specific changes using the Oracle Database 10x.  Thus, this paper has two purposes:
  1. Specifically to document actual changes for Financial Analytics
  2. Generally to walk through a performance tuning effort that you yourself may undertake
Note: You do not need to be working on Financial Analytics or even the BI Apps for the concepts in this article to apply.  It merely uses Financial Analytics as its example, and where appropriate I will explain the model.
I’m going to do something a bit different with this article in that I will tell the story of a recent performance tuning project for a client.  A previous integrator had delivered Financial Analytics and it was up and running in a production environment, but the performance was terrible.  Many queries were over 8 minutes.  We were asked to tune the GL Transactions star, but the lessons learned here will work for all modules of Financial Analytics, regardless of version.  In fact, implementing them for only one star actually boosted the performance of the other Financial Analytics Subject Areas.
I hope to impart the many aspects of performance tuning to highlight areas which you should also look at when needed.  As usual, I will focus on general concepts and key takeaways.  Additionally, some knowledge of GL structure and Financials will be useful but not mandatory.  Shown below are the basics of a Financial Analytics Star.  Of course there are many more dimensions, but I removed many of them so we can focus on the real heart of the solution.

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