Oracle Analytics Cloud – Reliason

Oracle Analytics – Simplified

Santosh Bhairi — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 04:52:28 +0000

As we all know, changing brand names is not an uncommon scenario these days and it was time for Oracle Business Intelligence products with over 10+ cloud and on-premise products names to modernize and simplify into one brand – Oracle Analytics.

During the recent summit on Oracle Analytics (you can watch the recorded session here), Oracle have announced massive changes to its product lines and offerings including a simplified pricing strategy. You can check this link for roadmap on Oracle Analytics.

Now with this simplified strategy, there are only three products for customers to choose from:

Oracle Analytics Cloud will serve as flagship offerings for stand-alone cloud analytics
Oracle Analytics Server is essentially a re-brand of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) providing the same product that’s popular within Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC).
Oracle Analytics for Applications will predominantly serve Oracle Fusion customers by offering pre-built BI Applications. The purpose of this product offering is to let users gain access to pre-built, auto-generated business content and insights and also reporting solutions for Fusion ERP applications. We hope that Oracle will extend the feature to include Oracle EBS for hybrid customers.

In this blog, we would like to cover specifically about Oracle Analytics Server and I will be talking about ‘Oracle Analytics Cloud’ and ‘Oracle Analytics for Applications’ in follow-up series.

Oracle Analytics Server brings the modern, industry-leading capabilities of Oracle Analytics Cloud to customers requiring on-premises deployments. Organizations can now take advantage of augmented analytics and world-class data discovery capabilities.

Oracle Analytics Server enables customers in highly regulated industries or with multi-cloud architectures to experience the latest analytics capabilities on their own terms and preferred deployment architecture. With Oracle Analytics Server, heritage systems can be maintained while a clear, easy, and seamless path to cloud is ready when you are.

Oracle Analytics Server is originated from its flagship product Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) and is an on-premise version, which provides an unmatched and comprehensive business intelligence and analytics platform that delivers a full range of capabilities like interactive dashboards, ad-hoc queries, data visualisations, augmented analytics, mobile analytics, notifications/alerts, etc.

Let’s look at its key features and benefits:

Key features

Easy-to-use ad hoc query and analysis – Provides business users an easy-to-use tool to explore the data, hiding the data structure complexity. Business Users can also combine data from multiple enterprise information source without any understanding of physical data storage.
Self-service data visualization capabilities – Gain instant clarify to improve your business with stunning pre-built visual analysis and self-service discovery tools. With Oracle Analytics Server, business users can experience any data – anytime and anywhere.
Augmented analytics – Oracle Analytics Server powers deeper insights by embedding machine learning and Artificial Intelligence into every aspect of the analytics process, making your job easier than ever. The user experience is also simplified with modern conversation-style analytics powered by natural-language processing.
Pixel perfect enterprise reporting – Oracle Analytics Server allows the creation of highly formatted templates, reports and documents such as flash reports, invoices, cheques, etc. from multiple data sources including relational, multi-dimensional, web-service, XML and many more. Tight integration with the Oracle Analytics Server platform allows users to quickly and seamlessly transfer their data, layout and format of a dashboard or analysis to an output or data export file.
Powerful geospatial mapping and visualization – Oracle Analytics Service provides an easy-way to create spatial visualization knows as map-views on data points such as country, state, highway, airline route, postal address, zip/post codes, location, etc.). These maps are fully interactive and data on the maps can be visualised using numerous formatting options including color fills, variables-sized markers, custom image markers, percentile binding, etc.

Server-Based Query, Reporting, and Analysis. Oracle Analytics Server generates queries optimized for each data source, appropriately aggregates them, and presents the results to users within a familiar web browser via easy-to-use dashboards and reports.

Key Benefits

Drive innovation; explore and discover new insights by combining structured and unstructured data
Deploy business best practices for line of business analysis and financial management using packaged analytic applications
Make insights accessible to anyone, anytime, and anywhere with mobile business intelligence
Provide extreme performance and lower total cost of ownership with Oracle engineered systems

Talk to us about how we can help your organization with efficient reporting solutions using Oracle Analytics products:

Reliason Solutions Limited
Level-2, 48-54 Moorgate
London, EC2R 6EJ, UK
Phone: +44 (0) 203 778 0091
Website: www.reliason.com
Email: sales@reliason.com

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Promote Oracle BICS Snapshot from Dev/Test to Prod Instance

Santosh Bhairi — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 18:04:47 +0000

1.0 Introduction

The objective of this article is to guide you through the detailed process involved with code-promotion of BICS snapshot (data-model, catalog content, application roles and security setups) from Development/Test to Production environment.

Please note this document is written based on Oracle BICS current version 17.1.6.0.0. Some of the screenshots may look different in future releases.

If you are looking for migrating Oracle BI-Apps RPD to BICS, check this article for detailed steps.

2.0 Pre-requisites

Please follow the below pre-requisites before promoting the snapshot into Production environment:

Take a snapshot of your target (production) BICS environment (in case of any issues during migration and to restore at a later date) using console as shown below and set a password.

3.0 Creation of Snapshot in Dev/Test Environment

Before taking snapshot, make sure to unlock/publish any data-models and also logout any BICS sessions so snapshot will be in a clean state.

Login to your BICS dev/test environment and navigate to Console -> Snapshot and Models -> Create a Snapshot and give an appropriate Description.

Download the created snapshot and provide a password which is required for ‘Upload Snapshot’ step in target/production environment.

4.0 Upload/Replace of Snapshot in Production Environment

Before proceeding further, make sure all the steps mentioned in section 2 above are fulfilled on creating backup snapshots.

Login to BICS Production -> Launch Console -> Click on Snapshot and Models -> Upload Snapshot -> select the snapshot created in section 3 above and provide the password.

Once the snapshot is uploaded, you will see the below confirmation about successful upload of Snapshot:

Now that the snapshot is available in your production environment, the next step is to Restore to make use of it:

You will be prompted with three Restore options and check the appropriate options:

a.	Data Model	To promote data-model (rpd) related changes only
b.	Application Roles	To promote New or Updated application roles
c.	Catalog	To promote new or updated Catalog objects

Check all options if your code-migration involves all three areas. If not, choose the appropriate ones.

You will see a successful snapshot restore completion message if everything goes well during restore process.

In order to review restored objects, navigate to:

a.	Catalog	reports, dashboards, visual analyser projects, etc.
b.	Application Roles	new changes/updates for objects, joins, hierarchies, etc.
c.	Catalog	new or updated application roles, users, permissions, etc.

5.0 How to promote individual objects to Production Environment?

In the above steps, we looked at promoting entire catalog or data-model or application roles but not on promoting individual components. Now, first let’s look at how to promote individual catalog objects (reports, dashboards, visual analyser projects, filters, prompts, etc.).

Navigate to Oracle BICS / Catalog and select a Folder and click on Archive and choose the appropriate permissions:

It generates a file with folder name and with an extension of .catalog (ex: Disco to BICS Migration.catalog).

Or if you want an individual object to be archived, check this screenshot (ex: Sales Effectiveness V1.catalog).

At the moment, there is no option available to promote a portion of RPD or application roles separately. If there is one available in near future, this blog will be updated.

If you need more information, please do not hesitate to contact us at +44 (0)207 7780091 or info@reliason.com. Alternatively, visit us at www.reliason.com to learn about how we can help your Organisation on Oracle BI technologies and to access our whitepapers and test-drives.

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Migrate Oracle BI-Apps Content into Oracle BICS Environment

Santosh Bhairi — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 16:15:08 +0000

The objective of this article is to guide you through the detailed process involved with migration of on-premise OBIA with different analytics applications (Finance, SCM, HR, Procurement and Spend, Manufacturing Analytics and Custom Subject Areas) to cloud-based Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service (BICS).

Oracle BICS is one of the latest cloud offering from Oracle with a proven platform for creating powerful business intelligence applications, enabling users from the workgroup to the enterprise.

Some of the features of Oracle BICS:

Offers presentation services to create analyses, dashboards and visualisations
Oracle database cloud service integration
Self-service web-client data loader and data modeller
Simple administration and integrated identity management
Multiple data-loading options with connections to on-premise databases
Always-on with automated backup, recovery and migration
Take advantage of Oracle’s cloud-first approach to receive new enhancements or bug-fixes early compared to its on-premise versions
Mobile-ready – every report, dashboard or visualisation is immediately available without any extra-programming

Before getting into more details, let’s discuss the need to migrate Oracle BI-Apps content to Oracle BICS. Consider you are on OBIA 7964 version with OBIEE 11g versions which

a. Is an On-premise – your users have to be on a company network or on VPN in order to access Reports and Dashboards
b. Does not offer rich and interactive reports/dashboards and stunning visualisations
Requires engaging your own resources for routine upgrades and maintenance and patches for bug-fixes or new features
c. Requires engaging your technical teams for regular maintenance, backup and recovery activities
d. Does not receive automatic upgrades or new features
e. Does not offer mobile capabilities
f. Is not highly scalable
g. Takes more efforts for capacity resize of both Users and Hardware

So the above barriers (there are many more under the hood!) can be easily achieved by moving your Oracle BI-Apps content to Oracle BICS.

NOTE: This document is written based on Oracle BICS current version 17.1.4.0.0. Some of the screenshots may look different in future releases.

1.1 Migration Path

Since Oracle’s acquisition of Siebel Analytics in the year 2005, there are multiple major versions of OBIEE have been released. As an existing customer one could still have any of these previous versions, though many of them are out of support already.

You can practically migrate from any previous versions of OBIEE or Seibel Analytics to Oracle BICS. With the older version, the path you take may be different and relatively longer. The diagram below highlights the path to Oracle BICS from different versions of OBIEE:

If you are on OBIEE 11g and thinking to move to latest tech-stack OBIEE 12c, check this detailed document.

And if you are still on OBIEE 10g, it is high-time to consider upgrading to latest OBIEE tech-stack to take advantage of abundant enhancements and stunning new features. Check Oracle’s link for a step-by-step upgrade instructions:

2.0 Pre-requisites

There are a few requisites to be followed before getting into action:

a. Take a snapshot of your BICS environment (in case of any issues during migration and to restore at a later date) using console as shown below and set a password as well.
b. A Database as a Service (DBaaS) instance is required which is already part of your Oracle BICS subscription
c. BI Administration Tool (for RPD) needs to be 11.1.1.6 or later
d. An error-free RPD passed through consistency check (warnings can be fine but no errors)

NOTE: Migrated on-premise RPD cannot be modified in Oracle BICS environment. Any modifications need to be handled in on-premise environment and upload the data model again. If you attempt, you will receive this type of warning:

3.0 Migration Process

Let’s look at the process involved in moving Oracle BI-Apps content (Finance, SCM, HR, Procurement and Spend, Manufacturing Analytics, etc.) into Oracle BICS.

In order to cover the process in-depth, this article is divided into three parts:

Migrate Oracle BI-Apps RPD and Catalog to Oracle BICS
Handling Data Loads
Enabling Security, Responsibilities and Application Roles

First, let’s look at the process involved in migration of Oracle BI-Apps RPD/Data Model and Catalog to Oracle BICS. We will be covering the other two parts separately.

The migration process mainly consists of three parts:

3.1 RPD Lift and Shift
3.2 Webcat Lift and Shift
3.3 Migration of Application Roles

3.1 RPD Lift and Shift

As shown in the below diagram, develop your data model using on-premise BI Administration Tool, make sure to run global consistency check to avoid any type of errors (warnings are fine) then change the physical connections to point to your on-premise database or Oracle DB Cloud Service. Please note during RPD lift and shift process, you cannot connect to BICS own database.

Once these are done, upload the data model (.rpd file) onto Oracle BICS using Console and Replace Data Model.

3.1.1 Develop Data Model

If you already have up and running on-premise OBIEE instance, there is no need to develop a separate data model instead you can use the same data model/rpd file. If not, you may have to develop a thorough and working data model.

3.1.2 Consistency Check

It is recommended practice to run a global consistency check after every change in data model/rpd to avoid any potential inconsistencies which leads to issues in starting the services or report errors. Typically, any warnings can be ignored as they arise out the best-practices but they can be fixed as well so your RPD will be in a good state.

3.1.3 Change RPD Database Connections to Cloud

Obtain necessary Database Cloud Service hostname, username and password for updating respective RPD physical connection pools as your on-premise RPD physical connections will be pointed to on-premise database.

3.1.4 Upload data model onto Oracle BICS

Before proceeding further, please make sure the snapshot is created as mentioned above under Pre-requisites. Login to Oracle BICS environment and click on Console and then on Snapshots and Models.

Click on Replace Data Model and choose on-premise rpd/data model and provide the password which is your rpd default password.

Depending on the size of the data model (and connectivity), it takes couple of minutes to load it and you can check also the status of completion in the task bar of the window.

If there no errors during upload process, you will a success message with your data model name on the top of Console screen.

To verify the uploaded data model, click on Analysis and Create Analysis and you should be able to see new subject-areas similar to your on-premise data model:

3.2 Webcat Lift and Shift

To upload on-premise webcat content, it must be from another Oracle BICS or OBIEE 11.1.1.9.0 and above versions only. The below activities need to be performed:

3.2.1 Replace ‘shared’ with ‘company_shared’

Check if you need to replace any folders as your on-premise webcat might have something like ‘/shared’ and your BICS with ‘company_shared’. This can be done with a simple XML Search/Replace option using on-premise BI Catalog Manager.

3.2.2 Archive On-Premise Catalog

Archive catalog and move to a temporary location. Choose options relevant options for timestamps and permissions whether to carry-forward them or not.

3.2.3 Un-archive On-Premise Catalog into Oracle BICS

Now, logon to Oracle BICS and then click on Catalog to Un-archive the catalog objects. It would be good to create a separate folder just to avoid any conflicts with existing catalog folders and objects.

Create a new folder ‘On-Premise Catalog’ under ‘Company Shared’ standard folder:

Select the newly created folder and click on Unarchive to select archived file and select a relevant option under Replace.

Your on-premise catalog objects are now in Oracle BICS:

3.3 Migration of Application Roles

If you already have OBIEE 12c on on-premise, it is easy to get a snapshot or .bar file for Application Roles. The .bar file can be directly imported into Oracle BICS using Console and Upload Snapshot options.

If not, they need to be created manually. We will be extensively talking about these steps in our next series on ‘Enabling Security’.

4.0 Limitations and Future Enhancements

At the moment, some of the features of Oracle BI-Apps are not supported in Oracle BICS environment. For such list, you may like to check Section # 5 of Oracle’s documentation for more information.

With regard to enhancements, there are none at the moment but looking at Oracle’s cloud-first strategy, one can expect a bunch of enhancements in the whole migration process, data loading and data security/governance.

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