Oracle Analytics Server is here!

After a very long wait, the successor of OBIEE is here. Oracle Analytics Server was made generally available on Friday the 31st of January.

Oracle Analytic Server (OAS) 5.5 is Available https://t.co/FCDAwW0ItF

— Oracle PSD EPM BI (@Oracle_EPMBI) January 31, 2020

At the Oracle Analytics Summit held last summer, Oracle Analytics Server was announced as part of the wider rationalisation of the Oracle Analytics product line.

Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) as its name suggests is Oracle’s cloud offering of an Analytics product. Oracle has focused heavily on developing and enhancing OAC and OBIEE has not seen as much development in the same period. OAC has gathered momentum in the self service analytics space as well as opening up the augmented analytics space. It also retained OBIEE’s governed analytics functionality which is in many people’s opinion, the unique selling point of Oracle’s analytics offering.

To bridge the gap between OAC and OBIEE, Oracle came up with the great idea of the Oracle Analytics Server product, OAS. Most of the OAC functionality is available in OAS and what makes this a very appealing prospect is the fact that OBIEE licensed users can upgrade to OAS for free.

How do I get it?

A very good question! Currently, OAS 5.5.0 is available from eDelivery - just search for “Oracle Analytics Server “.

You’ll notice that 5.5 is only available on the Linux operating system with a Windows variant to follow later on. Gianni Ceresa has written an excellent post on OAS and he has made a discovery of a slight issue with the version of the Fusion Middleware Infrastructure that is bundled with OAS on eDelivery.

Your best bet is to get a version of 12.2.1.4 Fusion Middleware Infrastructure from here.

There is an Oracle document with detailed steps of the installation which will come as no surprise to those who’ve done OBIEE 12c installations and upgrades.

Make sure that you’re JDK version is at least 1.8.0_221 and you’ll be good to go.

Upgrades

Currently, the only way that you can do upgrades from 12c to OAS is as an out-of-place upgrade. In-place upgrades will be available in future OAS releases.

Once you’ve completed the installation and configuration, you can use the BAR (BI Archive) file technique to migrate your 12c content over to your new OAS instance. Alternatively, you could do this via the snapshot feature available via the Oracle Analytics console.

Addendum

Not all of the OAC features are available in OAS and some of these include the Natural Language Generation augmented analytics feature.

Some OBIEE features within OAS have been disabled by default as there are plans to deprecate these features. This Oracle Support document provides a list of these features and also provides some information on how to enable these deprecated features.

Some of the OBIEE features to be deprecated in OAS include:

1. Act-As
   
2. System Session Variables
   
3. Flat files and XML data sources

The Baseline Validation Tool (BVT) is not currently supported with Oracle Analytics Server.