Master Data and Reference Data

Master Data:

A master data is information that an enterprise agree upon. And enterprise may or most likely to have several departments like HR, Marketing, Sales, Procurement, Manufacturing etc.

Now all these departments may have different system, HR department may have some HRMS, Marketing and Sales departments may have some Marketing and/or Sales Management system.

You would have products in the Marketing system and in the sales system too. That product data should be same in both the system, these are the products that both Market and sales agreed to use. It should not happen that both the 
systems have different set of products.

Another example could be Customer data.

Another example could be Employee data.

Another example could be Supplier data.

Reference Data:

Reference data is something that defines permissible limits to use the data.
Like currency codes which would be very much standards and would rarely change.

Reference data is mostly used to maintain data quality or data validation or data standardization purpose. 

If I am maintaining currency codes, then all the systems (be it HR, Sales etc..) should use same currency codes.


Another example of reference data could be Country Codes or State Codes.

Tableau Vs OBIEE

The major difference between OBIEE and Tableau is that Tableau doesn't really have a semantic layer (the BMM layer in OBIEE).  With Tableau, we have to have data well manicured (cosmetic treatment) in order to work effectively.  There are differences but thetwo can and should co-exist in any organization.

Tableau Merits Over OBIEE

·         Quick and rapid development of reports and dashboards.  Easy enough for business people to figure out with little to no training.  Companies may use Tableau for prototyping and then building the enterprise wide reports in something like OBIEE.

·         Great desktop reporting tool.

·         Has an excellent recommendation tool for which type of visual analysis to use based on selected data.

·         Almost true WYSIWIG.

·         Positioning of dashboard objects much more flexible.

·         Good free on demand training and extremely active user community.

·         Maps are very easy to use with lots of cool functionality.

OBIEE Merits Over Tableau

·         More advanced dashboarding capabilities such as conditional guided navigation.  Also much better at managing tons of dashboards. Use of sub reports.

·         Stronger enterprise level security and user management.

·        Shared reporting objects like filters

·         Better at federating data (connecting to multiple sources) than Tableau.  Tableau can do it and is OK at it, but OBIEE is the best of all reporting tools at it.

·         The best functioning KPI/scorecard reports,  an area where OBIEE rocks the competition.

·         Great integration to other Oracle products. IE, can interface directly with Fusion/EBS/Forms.

·         Has multi-user development support and better environment management/migration.  we don't need multiple environments for Tableau or multiple users working on the same reports.

·         Ad-Hoc reports can be created through the web interface by any user you grant access to.  That user, however, is limited to what you have defined in your semantic layer.  Tableau requires their client to do ad-hoc.  However, the user can then do any kind of logical calculations or other data manipulation they wish.

·         Can cache queries.  Works very well and write very efficient SQL when directly querying databases.  Tableau has a proprietary data format that basically works as a cube, which can slow down very quickly on large data sets.  It also is is pretty lackluster at performing direct queries in the database.

While Tableau continues to add features very quickly, it isn't up to a true enterprise wide reporting platform.  It is still best served for departmental use in the hands of a data analyst.

OBIEE requires a lot more effort to create even basic visualizations and usually requires a full development team.

There are pros and cons to both.  

Difference between Data Blending and Data Join

Joining is where you are able to combine data from the SAME data source, for example worksheets in an Excel file or tables in an Oracle database.  You need a common field, also called a key, that tells Tableau how to join the data.  You also need a key to do blending.

Blending is where you able to combine data from DIFFERENT data sources, for example a worksheet in Excel with a table from an Oracle database.  This is very powerful because in the past you would typically need to have someone with the specific technical skills create a new data set with the combined information.