Oracle recently released the much anticipated SampleApp virtual box  (version 511) which comes packed with OBIEE 12c and all of its great new features. 

You can download it here. 

SampleApp usage has always been a great way to get first hand experience of OBIEE. You can gain hands on experience before you're ready to unleash it to your clients. 

On a project I recently worked on, We were required to change the Managed Server port number. This could be required for a variety of reasons but most oftenly, its to change the OBIEE URL to exclude a port number.

In the documentation available for this, it seems like a straightforward enough change in the Weblogic console and a Server restart.

What I observed was that even after following all of these steps, some of the references to the old port remained within some of the OBIEE configuration files and these caused certain aspects like Action Framework Web Services and OBIEE Agents to throw errors.

After a careful look at the Configuration files, I found references to the old port. The two configuration files that contained these references were the:

1. BI Scheduler configuration file - $FMW_HOME\instances\instance1\config\OracleBISchedulerComponent\coreapplication_obisch1\instanceconfig.xml
2. BI Presentation Services configuration file - $FMW_HOME\instances\instance1\config\OracleBIPresentationServicesComponent\coreapplication_obips1\instanceconfig.xml

Use any standard Text Editor to search for references to the old port. Replace these with the new port and use OPMNCTL STOPPROC/STARTPROC to stop and start these OPMN processes as necessary.

OBIEE 12c is now available for download on Oracle's website. OBIEE 12.2.1.0.0 was made available on Friday evening (23rd October).

The highlights of this new version are Oracle's tool which looks set to squeeze Tableau's market share. Oracle has a new tool called Visual Analyser which is the main component of "Oracle Data Visualization" (ODV).

This tool enables users to "mashup" data from standard curated subjects areas with data held in flat files such as Excel spreadsheets. The only negative about this is that this tool requires an additional licence and this will unfortunately slow down the adoption of this exciting tool.

There has also been a significant rationalisation of the backend Architecture which will be music to the ears of all the OBIEE Administrators out there!

Big Data is also well catered for in OBIEE 12c.

Details of the new 12c features will follow in further blog posts.