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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Oracle recently released Data Gateway as the successor to Remote Data Connectorin the Oracle Analytics Cloud 105.3 release earlier this year.

Remote Data Connector was originally part of the Oracle Analytics Cloud, OAC predecessor - Business Intelligence Cloud Service (BICS). It is used in order to allow for connectivity to an on-premise data source from an Oracle Analytics Cloud instance.

Why Data Gateway?

In a nutshell, the Remote Data Connector is a bit cumbersome and rather long winded in setting up with network, DMZ, firewall configuraton all required. It also requires either a Tomcat or WebLogic application server.

Most importantly, the communication between OAC and Remote Data Connector is started off by OAC. OAC requires access through DMZ, firewall etc to the Remote Data Connector. Data Gateway on the other hand controls and manages the communication between OAC and Data Gateway.

With Data Gateway, when a user's request requires data from an on-premise data source that has been configured with Data Gateway, an HTTPS request is made and held open by OAC. This is a technique called "long polling". The Data Gateway agent picks up the HTTPS request and passes the query to the on-premise database. The Data Gateway agent passes the query resultset back to OAC via a new HTTPS communication which is linked to the original HTTPS request.

In addition to the SSL certificates used in the HTTPS communication, the communication between OAC and the Data Gateway agent is further secured by the public/private key which encrypts all communication.

As multiple Data Gateway agents can be setup, the Remote Data Gateway can be used to maintain high availability by setting up 2 Data Gateway agents per OAC instance.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock this week as well as steering clear from all forms of social media, then you would have heard about the Oracle Analytics Summit which took place at the Skywalker Ranch in California.

T.K. Anand, senior vice president, AI, Data Analytics and Cloud announced "a new beginning" that would be based on transparency, partnership and trust. Recently, Oracle announced its Analytics Roadmap, a new move for Oracle which appears to be indicative of this new approach.

The new vision of Oracle Analytics is to be based on three pillars:

1. Augmented - Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and AI are embedded throughout the product
2. Integrated - Providing the insights in the right place
3. Collaborative - Enabling users to share their insights across all lines of business and IT.

A recording of the Analytics Summit can be found below:

In this Summit, the Oracle Analytics Product Management team announced a consolidation of the Analytics product suite.

There were 18 products previously which have now been reduced to 3:

• Oracle Analytics Cloud
• Oracle Analytics Server
• Oracle Analytics for Cloud Applications

Oracle's Analytics capabilities will now be in the Cloud with Oracle Analytics Cloud, on premise with Oracle Analytics Server and in applications with Oracle Analytics for Oracle Cloud Applications.

What was previously called Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) has now been rebranded to Oracle Analytics Server. Everything that was available in the on premise OBIEE will now be available in this new product in addtion to the functionality that was only previously available in Oracle Analytics Cloud.

It will also offer users an easier path to migrate to the cloud. The Oracle Analytics Server will include Data Visualization. Existing OBIEE customers will automatically be licensed to use Oracle Analytics Server when it is available towards the end of the year.

The UI look and feel of the 3 products will be unified and a new homepage which brings together dashboards, analyses, BI Publisher reports, data visualisations.

Oracle Analytics for Applications will initially focus on ERP and HCM applications. It provides an end to end solution with out of the box ready to use dashboards and analyses as well as data integration capabilities. It is based on Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse and Oracle Analytics Cloud.

The key takeaway from this announcement could be summarised with one word - simplification. Everything from the product lineup, support model, licensing and the inter product integration has been simplified. The announcement also highlights Oracle's focus on Cloud as the backbone of its strategy.

The purpose of this blog post is to highlight the results of a number of Research Analysts reports that have been recently published on Analytics platforms and how Oracle Analytics Cloud measured up with other vendors.

451 Research
In the findings of 451 Research, it is claimed that “the sleeping giant has awakened “.451 Research notes that Oracle Analytics Cloud is the second largest part of Oracle’s PaaS business which is a bold statement if true.

Machine Learning and Artificial Inteligence features that have been incorporated into the Data Preparation functionality of the Data Visualisation tool got a mention.

Gartner
In Gartner’s 2019 Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence platforms, Oracle has made a re-entry after a brief absence in 2016 for being too IT centric and being late to the bimodal Analytics party.

Oracle made it back in as a Niche player by addressing this issue by expanding the functionality of the Data Visualisation tool giving end users the ability to mashup data from the IT managed semantic model with spreadsheets for instance. Gartner has recently mentioned a term, “Augmented Analytics” several times and it appears that Oracle has made huge strides in this direction by implementing such things as Data Preparation, Machine Learning and Natural Language generation which are all in line with Gartner’s Augmented Analytics.

Conclusion

You may have noticed the varied opinions of these Research results and I must admit that a lot of great work goes in to creating these reports but there is also a huge amount of subjectivity that is involved in the process.

These reports are useful but shouldn't be used in isolation when you may be on the market for Analytics tools. It should form part of the process.

The 1st edition of Oracle Openworld Europe took place earlier on the 16th and 17th of January 2019 here in London and the turnout was very good with estimates of 10000 people in attendance. There were hour long queues for registration on the first day!

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.