Localizing Oracle BI Data

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Objective
After completing this lesson, you should be able to localize
Oracle BI data to support multilingual environments.

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Business Challenges and Solution

Challenges:
Companies require multilingual support for global
deployments of Oracle BI.
Users need to make decisions based on applications and
data presented in their own language.
Solution:
Add multilingual support to Oracle BI.

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Oracle BI Multilingual Support

Requires three types of configurations:
Repository metadata, such as presentation folders
Focus of last lesson

Database data, such as product names

Focus of this lesson

Report and dashboard metadata, such as chart labels

Covered in a separate course

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Required Translation Tables

Data translation requires two tables:
List of values (LOV) language translation table
Provides functionality similar to metadata translation table

Available language table

Provides list of available user data languages

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ABC Example
Translate ABC product-type data from English to French.

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Steps for Localizing Data

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.

Create a language translation table.

Create an available language table.
Import tables to the Physical layer.
Create a session variable initialization block.
Create a language translation table alias.
Create physical joins.
Map the logical table source.
Create column mapping.
Apply a WHERE filter.

10.Verify the results.

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1. Create a Language Translation Table

This table contains required columns and the language value
translations.

TYPE: A categorization for

a set of values

Languageindependent code
(LIC): Identifies
which record is being
translated

LANG_ID: Code
that identifies the
language of the row

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VAL: Translated data

that is displayed to
the user

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2. Create an Available Language Table

This table stores a list of languages available for querying
against the data.
LANGUAGE: identifies the
language name

LANGUAGE_EXTENSION:
identifies language variations
based on country or region

LANG_ID: identifies the

language of the row

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3. Import Tables to the Physical Layer

Use known techniques to import language tables to the
Physical layer of the repository.

Available language table

Language translation table

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4. Create a Session Variable Initialization Block

Create a session variable initialization block to check whether
the language selected by the user is in the language table.

Checks whether the user

language preference stored
in WEBLANGUAGE is in the
D1_LANG table

Session variable

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Language default if the preferred language

is not found in the D1_LANG table

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5. Create a Language Translation Table Alias

Create an alias of the LOV table for each column that needs to
be translated.

Set the alias name to the

name of the column to be
translated.

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6. Create Physical Joins

Create a join between the product dimension and the alias for
the column translation.

Dimension table
column to be
translated

joins to LIC
in alias table.
Join finds all
translations in
alias table for a
given item type.

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7. Map the Logical Table Source

Map an existing logical table source to the alias.

Alias table

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8. Create Column Mapping

Modify the Type field to map to the VAL column in the ItemType
(D1_LOV_D) alias.

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9. Apply a WHERE Filter

To the logical table source,
apply a WHERE filter that:
Searches in the alias table
for records that have the
same language ID as
specified in the language
initialization block
Identifies the set of records
in the alias table that are of
the ABC Product Type
category

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10. Verify the Results

Run a query in Answers and verify that the expected results
are returned.

Check the log file and verify that the VAL column is accessed
with the expected WHERE clause.

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Summary
In this lesson, you should have learned how to localize Oracle
BI data to support multilingual environments.

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Practice 15-1 Overview:

Localizing Oracle BI Data
In this practice, you localize product type data from English to
French.

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