Oracle Financial List of Terms

Accounting calendar
Accounting calendar defines the accounting periods and fiscal year of an organization in Oracle General Ledger.
Accounting period
Each period in a fiscal year is called an accounting period.
Adjustment
Adjustment is a feature that enables you to increase or decrease the amount of an invoice.
Allocation
Allocation is a method for distributing amounts between projects and departments.
Allocation method
An allocation method specifies how the amount in the source pool is allocated to projects or departments. There are two allocation methods, full allocation and incremental allocation.
AutoAllocation set
An AutoAllocation set is a group of allocations that you can execute in sequence that you specify (step-down allocations) or at the same time (parallel allocations).
Category
A category is a code that is used to group similar items.
Chart of accounts
A chart of accounts is the account structure of an organization that is used to record transactions and maintain account balances.
Concurrent request
A concurrent request is a request to Oracle Applications to complete a task, such as posting a journal entry. After a request is submitted, Oracle Applications automatically processes the request without further involvement from the user.
Drilldown
Drilldown is a software feature that enables you to view the details of an item in the current window by using a window in a different application.
Field
A field is a position on a window that you use to enter, view, update, or delete information.
Flexfield
A flexfield is an Oracle Applications field composed of segments. Each segment has a name and a set of valid values. Oracle Applications use flexfields to record information about an organization.
Foreign currency
Foreign currency is defined for a set of books to record and conduct accounting transactions in a currency other than the functional currency.
Formula recurring journal
A formula recurring journal is a recurring journal that uses a formula to calculate the amount of the journal. In a formula recurring journal, you specify a formula instead of an amount.
Functional currency
The functional currency is the principal currency that is used to maintain accounting data in General Ledger.
General ledger
General ledger is an accounting system that tracks the journal entries that affect each account.
Import
Import is a utility that enables you to bring data from an export file into an Oracle8 table. This utility can be used to restore archived data.
Incremental allocation
An incremental allocation method is used to create expenditure items based on the difference between the transactions processed from one allocation to the next.
Journal
A journal is a debit or credit to a general ledger account.
Journal batch
A journal batch is a method used to group journal entries according to your set of books and accounting period. You can name your journal entry batches the way you want for easy identification in your general ledger.
Journal entry lines
Journal entry lines are the journal entries that are posted to update account balances. The number and type of entry lines in a journal depend on the number of transactions.
List of values
A list of values is used to select a single value from a predefined list.
MassAllocations
A MassAllocation is a single journal entry that is used to allocate revenues and expenses across departments, divisions, and so on.
Operator
A operator is a mathematical symbol that is used to indicate the mathematical operation in a calculation.
Parallel allocation
A parallel allocation set is a set of allocation rules in an autoallocation set that are carried out without following a sequence.
Posting
Posting is the process of updating account balances in ledger from journal entries.
Primary set of books
A primary set of books is a set of books that is used to manage a business.
Recurring journal entry
A recurring journal entry is a journal entry that is defined once, and repeated in each accounting period.
Responsibility
Responsibility is a level of authority in Oracle General Ledger. Each responsibility provides a user with access to a menu and a set of books. Responsibilities help control security in Oracle General Ledger.
Reversing journal entry
A reversing journal entry is a journal entry in General Ledger that is created by reversing an existing journal entry. You can reverse any journal entry and post it to any open accounting period.
Set of books
A set of books is a financial reporting entity that uses a particular chart of accounts, functional currency, and accounting calendar. You must define at least one set of books for each business location.
Standard recurring journal
A standard recurring journal is a recurring journal whose amount is the same each accounting period.
Step-down allocation
A step-down allocation set is a set of allocation rules that are carried out serially, in the sequence specified in the autoallocation set. Usually, the result of each step will be used in the next step.
Subledger
A subledger is an application other than General Ledger in which accounting entries can originate.

Analytic Functions in Oracle 8i and 9i

Overview
Analytic Functions, which have been available since Oracle 8.1.6, are designed to address such problems as "Calculate a running total", "Find percentages within a group", "Top-N queries", "Compute a moving average" and many more. Most of these problems can be solved using standard PL/SQL, however the performance is often not what it should be. Analytic Functions add extensions to the SQL language that not only make these operations easier to code; they make them faster than could be achieved with pure SQL or PL/SQL. These extensions are currently under review by the ANSI SQL committee for inclusion in the SQL specification.
How Analytic Functions Work ?
Analytic functions compute an aggregate value based on a group of rows. They differ from aggregate functions in that they return multiple rows for each group. The group of rows is called a window and is defined by the analytic clause. For each row, a "sliding" window of rows is defined. The window determines the range of rows used to perform the calculations for the "current row". Window sizes can be based on either a physical number of rows or a logical interval such as time.
Analytic functions are the last set of operations performed in a query except for the final ORDER BY clause. All joins and all WHERE, GROUP BY, and HAVING clauses are completed before the analytic functions are processed. Therefore, analytic functions can appear only in the select list or ORDER BY clause.
The Syntax
The Syntax of analytic functions is rather straightforward in appearance
Analytic-Function(,,...)

OVER (

)

Analytic-Function
Specify the name of an analytic function, Oracle actually provides many analytic functions such as AVG, CORR, COVAR_POP, COVAR_SAMP, COUNT, CUME_DIST, DENSE_RANK, FIRST, FIRST_VALUE, LAG, LAST, LAST_VALUE, LEAD, MAX, MIN, NTILE, PERCENT_RANK, PERCENTILE_CONT, PERCENTILE_DISC, RANK, RATIO_TO_REPORT, STDDEV, STDDEV_POP, STDDEV_SAMP, SUM, VAR_POP, VAR_SAMP, VARIANCE.
Arguments
Analytic functions take 0 to 3 arguments.
Query-Partition-Clause
The PARTITION BY clause logically breaks a single result set into N groups, according to the criteria set by the partition expressions. The words "partition" and "group" are used synonymously here. The analytic functions are applied to each group independently, they are reset for each group.
Order-By-Clause
The ORDER BY clause specifies how the data is sorted within each group (partition). This will definitely affect the outcome of any analytic function.
Windowing-Clause
The windowing clause gives us a way to define a sliding or anchored window of data, on which the analytic function will operate, within a group. This clause can be used to have the analytic function compute its value based on any arbitrary sliding or anchored window within a group
Example: Calculate a running Total
This example shows the cumulative salary within a departement row by row, with each row including a summation of the prior rows salary.
set autotrace traceonly explainbreak on deptno skip 1column ename format A6column deptno format 999column sal format 99999column seq format 999
SELECT ename "Ename", deptno "Deptno", sal "Sal",

SUM(sal) OVER (ORDER BY deptno, ename) "Running Total", SUM(SAL)

OVER (PARTITION BY deptno ORDER BY ename) "Dept Total", ROW_NUMBER()

OVER (PARTITION BY deptno ORDER BY ENAME) "Seq"

FROM emp

ORDER BY deptno, ename

Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) in Oracle Database 10g

AWR Features

The AWR is used to collect performance statistics including:
A) Wait events used to identify performance problems.
B) Time model statistics indicating the amount of DB time associated with a process from the V$SESS_TIME_MODEL and V$SYS_TIME_MODEL views.
C) Active Session History (ASH) statistics from the V$ACTIVE_SESSION_HISTORY view.
D) Some system and session statistics from the V$SYSSTAT and V$SESSTAT views.
E) Object usage statistics.
F) Resource intensive SQL statements.

The repository is a source of information for several other Oracle 10g features including:
Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor
SQL Tuning Advisor
Undo Advisor
Segment Advisor

Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM) analyzes in Oracle 10g

The Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM) analyzes data in the Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) to identify potential performance bottlenecks. For each of the identified issues it locates the root cause and provides recommendations for correcting the problem. An ADDM analysis task is performed and its findings and recommendations stored in the database every time an AWR snapshot is taken provided the STATISTICS_LEVEL parameter is set to TYPICAL or ALL. The ADDM analysis includes:
CPU load
Memory usage
I/O usage
Resource intensive SQL
Resource intensive PL/SQL and Java
RAC issues
Application issues
Database configuration issues
Concurrency issues Object contention

Automatic SQL Tuning in Oracle Database 10g

This article the discusses the new features which automate the tuning of SQL statements in Oracle 10g:
Overview
In its normal mode the query optimizer needs to make decisions about execution plans in a very short time. As a result it may not always be able to obtain enough information to make the best decision. Oracle 10g allows the optimizer to run in tuning mode where it can gather additional information and make recommendations about how specific statements can be tuned further. This process may take several minutes for a single statement so it is intended to be used on high-load resource-intensive statements.In tuning mode the optimizer performs the following analysis:
Statistics Analysis
The optimizer recommends the gathering of statistics on objects with missing or stale statistics. Additional statistics for these objects are stored in an SQL profile.
SQL Profiling - The optimizer may be able to improve performance by gathering additional statistics and altering session specific parameters such as the OPTIMIZER_MODE. If such improvements are possible the information is stored in an SQL profile. If accepted this information can then used by the optimizer when running in normal mode. Unlike a stored outline which fixes the execution plan, an SQL profile may still be of benefit when the contents of the table alter drastically. Even so, it's sensible to update profiles periodically. The SQL profiling is not performed when the tuining optimizer is run in limited mode.
Access Path Analysis
The optimizer investigates the effect of new or modified indexes on the access path. It's index recommendations relate to a specific statement so where necessary it will also suggest the use of the SQL Access Advisor to check the impact of these indexes on a representative SQL workload.
SQL Structure Analysis - The optimizer suggests alternatives for SQL statements that contain structures that may impact on performance. The implementation of these suggestions requires human intervention to check their validity. The automatic SQL tuning features are accessible from Enterprise Manager on the "Advisor Central" page these or from PL/SQL using the DBMS_SQLTUNE package. This article will focus on the PL/SQL API as the Enterprise Manager interface is reasonably intuative.

Source www.oracle.com