The Oracle Analytics Product Management team descended on London ahead of the Oracle OpenWorld Europe event for the Oracle Analytics Summit London event held at The Soho Hotel in London on the 11th of February earlier this week.

The day kicked off with a Partner Advisory Council session from the Product Management team which included a look ahead at the roadmap for Oracle Analytics as well as a Q&A session which was very informative.

There were several other sessions throughout the day providing participants with a wealth of knowledge on all things Oracle Analytics.

The biggest announcement of the day was undoubtedly Oracle being named a visionary in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms. The news was hot off the press and received mixed reactions.

Oracle has had a torrid time in the eyes of the Market Researchers in recent times with the likes of Gartner completely excluding Oracle from the Analytics Magic Quadrant not too long ago. Gartner's justification was regarding the fact that Oracle's Analytics offerings provided little or no self service features which is an opportunity that Oracle missed with the likes of Qlik, Tableau & Power Bi to name but a few that filled the gap in the Self Service Analytics space.

The Oracle Analytics team has filled the Self Service void with a variety of features and products including products and features like Oracle Analytics Desktop, Data Visualisation, Natural Language Processing and all the Augmented capabilities that enable end users to get to their insights with little or no IT intervention. This focus and attention led to Gartner bringing Oracle back into the Magic Quadrant as a niche player.

Oracle has made huge strides in the self service analytics space at the expense of the governed analytics capabilities that hasn't seen much development and enhancements in recent times.

The governed analytics part of the Oracle Analytics product is very mature and is its unique selling point. You hear of many stories where end users have acquired a self service analytics tool and plug it into OBIEE's semantic model. Most of the "new age" analytics tools are geared around self service and there still appears to be a huge demand for governed analytics which Oracle Analytics provides alongside its self service capabilities.

Some have said that Oracle may have taken their eye off the ball in order to focus all attention on getting back into Gartner's good books. As mentioned previously, a lot of attention has been focused on self service capabilities possibly to the detriment of governed analytics capabilities.

There was a mix of the Oracle Analytics Product Management team, Partners and Customers in attendance at the Oracle Analytics Summit and it was great to see and hear first hand from the Product Management team.

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