Recently a fellow obihackers group member (HT - @BecWagner) asked me how I gain quick access to the wide array of information that Oracle provides. Over a vast period of time, I have built up a number of techniques which I virtually use on a daily basis in order to get the most out of the Oracle Support tools. This blog describes a number of techniques that I have adopted.

Metalink AKA My Oracle Support

Die hard old school veterans will refer to Oracle's Support website as Metalink. The Support site has a “hot topics email” setting where you can set up an email to be sent to you and alert you of new documents, bugs etc of Oracle products.

Click on your account name at the top right of screen and then click on “My Account”.

Under the Settings tab, click on the”Hot Topics Email” link on the menu on the left hand side.

Ensure the correct email address is displayed below. This address is linked to the email address that you have associated with your Oracle account.

Under the Selected Products section, click on Add to add any products that you would like to receive information about.

Search for all products that are of interest to you and optionally select the platform if required.

A sample email below:

Bookmarks

There is some functionality that enables you to bookmark useful articles for quicker retrieval when required.

Each article has a star beside it which when clicked on becomes solid to indicate that it has been added to your favourites.

You also have an option to mange your favourites where you can group articles into sub folders.

in the Mange Favourites window, you can create folders and move articles around into these newly created folders.

I hope this is useful and if it proves popular, I’ll try to put together a part 2in the not too distant future.

I'd start this blog by issuing a warning that Direct Database requests should be used sparingly. A Direct Database Request (DDR) bypasses the OBIEE metadata defined in the repository and this can have security implications if not managed properly where users could potentially have access to data that they should not have access to.

There are some use cases for DDRs like building an OBIEE analysis to display the status of a transactional process for instance.

According to the OBIEE user guide documentation, you can not specify conditional formatting for columns of a Direct Database Request.

This post describes a "workaround" which enables you to achieve this. In the example below, all you need is a little HTML and bingo!

All you need is a CASE statement to implement the conditions of your logic and on the column that you'd be applying the formatting, go to Column Properties > Data Format and change the Treat Text As field to HTML.

Whilst running the exportServiceInstance WLST API command on an OBIEE​ 12.2.1.3 instance to generate an OBIEE 12c BAR file, I got this warning message:

In 12.2.1.4, however, the warning is now an error message:

There doesn't appear to be any Oracle documentation about what the replacement APIs are other than the location in the 12.2.1.4 error message (see above). The importServiceInstance WLST API command is also impacted by this.

A list of files in the /bitools/bin directory shows there are 2 scripts called import_bar.sh and export_service_instance.sh.

The export_service_instance.sh script takes the following parameters:

1. <service key> - the service instance is typically ssi
2. <bar location> - the location where the bar file should be created
3. [excludes] which is a comma separated list of nouserfolders and/or noconnectioncredentials where nouserfolders indicates that user folders will be excluded from the generated BAR file and noconnectioncredentials indicates that repository connection credentials will be excluded from the generated BAR file.

An example call to this script would be:

​For the import_bar.sh script, the parameters are as below:

1. <service key> - the service instance is typically ssi
2. <bar location> - the location of the bar file
3. [excludes] which is a comma separated list of nodatamodel,nocontent,noauthorization where nodatamodel indicates that the repository won't be imported, nocontent indicates that the web catalog won't be imported and noconnectioncredentials indicates that repository connection credentials won't be imported.

An example call to this script would be:

These new APIs are available in 12.2.1.3 as well as 12.2.1.4. They appear to be more straightforward to execute as the old WLST API commands took up to 8 parameters!

UPDATE

The import_bar.sh command is deprecated in OBIEE 12.2.1.4. If it is used, custom application roles will not be imported and there are no errors by the way.

In 12.2.1.4, you will need to use the import archive.sh command which is located in the bitools directory.

The parameters for this command are as follows:

Service Instance
Location of BAR file to be imported

There is a list of optional parameters as well which determine what content of the BAR file is required for the import.

More details of the importarchive.sh command can be found here

Oracle have just released a major update to Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC).

A major change that will be immediately evident is the change to the User Interface. It is now in line with the Interface that exists in Data Visualisation Desktop Tool.

Amongst the new features are the introduction of BI Publisher integration into OAC. Pixel perfect report is now available in Oracle’s Cloud product.

More information about the latest version can be found here. 

A useful Administration guide contains all the necessary information needed in order to get up and running with OAC 17.4.5.

Earlier this week, Elffar attended the U.K. Oracle User Group in Birmingham. There were a large number of Analytics focused sessions which we attended and it was a great experience.

This blog post highlights the key Analytics takeaways from the conference.

Cloud
The obvious one was Cloud. Oracle are gambling a lot on making Cloud a viable alternative option for existing on-premise customers. There were a lot of sessions which covered several Oracle Cloud products which included:

1. Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC pronounced as OAK apparently)
2. Oracle Autonomous Datawarehouse Cloud
3. Oracle IaaS Cloud
4. Data Visualisation Cloud

Self Service Bimodal Analytics
One of the main talking points from an Analytics perspective high up on the agenda was Oracle’s latest release of its Self Service tool - Data Visualisation Desktop v4.0. This tool is Oracle’s answer to Gartner’s Oracle exclusion from the Analytics Magic Quadrant last year. In several recently released technology analyst reports, Oracle has not just reappeared in their research studies but has placed quite highly.

According to Gartner’s report (subscription required) earlier in the year, Oracle’s lack of a Bimodal visions was the main reasoning behind Oracle being completely excluded from their report. Oracle released a blog post earlier in the year to describe their point of view.


Data Visualisation in its various forms (DVD, DVCS

The next blog post in this series will focus on the up and coming technologies that are being integrated into Oracle’s offerings for example, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Apache Kafka.

Part of the OBIEE upgrade includes a migration of the OBIEE 11g artefacts. The migration script provided by Oracle upgrades and migrates the Web Catalog and the Repository. This script doesn't migrate WebLogic users. 

In order to avoid manually recreating these users in the 12c environment, you can use the Migration facility in WebLogic to export the Users, Groups & Administration Roles from the Security Realm. This will also incorporate the assignment of Users to WebLogic groups and Administration Roles.

This is achieved by:

1.  Exporting data to a set of files on the 11g server. You'll need to provide a path in the Export Directory on Server field.
2. Copying these files over to the 12c server
3. Importing the security data into the 12c Security Realm.

Once all users have been successfully migrated, remember to delete the BISystemUser account in the 12c environment as 12c does not support a BI System User.

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.