What is the Discoverer Catalog? What is the OLAP Catalog?

5-2 Oracle Fusion Middleware Configuration Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence Discoverer 5.1.1 What is the Discoverer Catalog? The Discoverer Catalog is a repository for storing and retrieving definitions of objects for Discoverer Plus OLAP. There is one Discoverer Catalog per database. The Discoverer Catalog can also be used by applications that are built with Oracle Business Intelligence Beans BI Beans. With Discoverer Plus OLAP, end users store in the Discoverer Catalog objects such as workbooks, calculations, and saved selections and share objects with others who have access to the Discoverer Catalog. In a BI Beans application, a user can create a graph and store it in the Discoverer Catalog. If another user has appropriate access, that user can retrieve the graph that was stored in the Discoverer Catalog and insert the graph into a new worksheet in Discoverer Plus OLAP. Oracle Business Intelligence creates a new user on the Oracle Business Intelligence middle tier installation called D4OSYS to hold the Discoverer Catalog. The Discoverer Catalog provides security at the object level, by allowing users and system administrators to specify privileges for certain objects. The objects are saved in the Oracle database in XML format. Note: Do not confuse the Discoverer Catalog, which contains object definitions, with the OLAP Catalog. 5.1.2 What is the OLAP Catalog? The OLAP Catalog defines logical multidimensional objects that can be mapped either to columns in the tables of a star or snowflake schema or to multidimensional objects in an analytic workspace. Each database instance contains only one OLAP Catalog. An analytic workspace stores multidimensional data objects and procedures that are written in the OLAP DML. The OLAP DML is a data manipulation language that is understood by the Oracle OLAP calculation engine. The OLAP DML extends the analytic capabilities of querying languages such as SQL and the OLAP API to include forecasting, modeling, and what-if scenarios. For more information, see Oracle OLAP Reference. 5.1.3 What properties can objects in the Discoverer Catalog have?