Tag Archives: Oracle BI Apps

April 15, 2013   Rittman Mead

OBIEE, OEM12cR2 and the BI Management Pack Part 1: Introduction to OEM12cR2

A few years ago I wrote a series of blog posts, and an OTN article, on managing OBIEE 10g using Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR4 and the BI Management Pack, an extra-licensable option for OEM that provided additional management capabilities for OBIEE  and the BI Apps Data Warehouse Administration Console. The BI Management Pack was reasonably popular at the time but disappeared with the move to Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control, but with the recent release of EM12cR2 it’s come back again, but now with additional capabilities around WebLogic, GoldenGate, TimesTen and Essbase. I covered the news of this new release a few months ago, and since then our customers are often asking about these new capabilities, but information on Oracle’s website and the web is pretty thin so I thought I’d go through it in a bit more detail, today talking about how the product works, tomorrow going through installation and configuration and then on the third day, covering some of the common requests and questions we’ve had from our own customers.

Unlike Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control (or indeed Database Control, the equivalent for the Oracle Database), Enterprise Manager 12cR2 Cloud Control is designed to manage multiple target systems, not just the one that its installed on. What this means is that you can manage all of your BI domains from one place, along with all of your databases, your GoldenGate installation, the DAC, Essbase and so forth, with their details held in a management repository stored in an Oracle database. The diagram below shows a typical OEM12cR2 topology, with the OEM installation on a server connected to the repository database, and OBIEE and other BI “targets” installed on other servers in the organisation.

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OEM is actually made up of two parts, and a database repository. The Oracle Management Service runs within a WebLogic domain and comprises of a Web Console (what we’d know as Enterprise Manager) and “Platform Background Services”, a set of background services that communicate with the target hosts and store the relevant information. The other part of OEM is the “Oracle Management Agent”, a server process thats installed on each monitored host that collects metrics to pass back to OMS and PBS, and executes tasks such as stopping and starting the target on behalf of OMS. OEM12cR2 Cloud Controls stores its metadata and monitoring data in a separate repository database, which can either be on the same server as OMS or on a separate machine – note that if you use a database instance that’s previously had Database Control enabled on it (as most of them have), you need to disable and remove it before you can use it for OEM’s own repository.

One of the main benefits of OEM12cR2 compared to standalone management consoles is that it manages the majority of Oracle’s server products – WebLogic Server, Oracle Database, Exadata, Exalogic, E-Business Suite and so on, though you need to read the small print as management covers more features in some products than others – we’ll get back to this point later on. At its best though, OEM12cR2 becomes your central monitoring point for all products (including some third party ones, via plugins), allowing you to monitor, manage, patch and maintain all of your servers from the one place.

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As well as managing all hosts in one place, headline benefits of OEM12cR2 over “free” Fusion Middleware Control include:

  • Monitor all BI Domains in one place, so you can see their versions, host types, patch levels etc
  • Perform WebLogic lifecycle-type tasks such as patching the installation, packing and unpacking managed servers to move them between hosts, deploying test-to-production
  • Define quality of service checks, create alerts for slow response times, hosts down etc
  • Persist and store metrics, rather than only display them whilst you have the Metric screen open in your browser

Like the Oracle database though, Enterprise Manager comes with a number of extra-cost packs, including:

  • Database Lifecycle Management Pack for Oracle Database
  • Data Masking Pack
  • Test Data Management Pack
  • WebLogic Server Management Pack Enterprise Edition
  • SOA Management Pack

and, of course, the BI Management Pack. So what do you get in the base version of OEM before you need to start paying for these packs? For all of the database, middleware and other targets, you can deploy agents, set alerts and define metric thresholds, and for Oracle Database specifically you can use the data movement features, view errors, use Advisor Central and so on, whereas the stuff you really want such as performance pages, wait event breakdowns and so on are extra cost. Same goes for WebLogic, with a small base-level set of functionality that’s pretty-much limited to discovering the WebLogic installation, then stopping and starting it, in other words what you get for “free” with Fusion Middleware Control. For BI, again you can display what you would normally see in Fusion Middleware Control (database and middleware licensed customers can use base-level Oracle Enterprise Manager at no extra license cost, so this would follow), but if you’re after anything else such as persisted metrics, service tests and so forth, figure on buying a few of the add-on management packs.

My article on OEM Grid Control 10gR4′s BI Management pack described the features that are still the core of OEM12cR2′s BI Management Pack, which at the time included the features below, as shown in the screenshot below.

  • The ability to collect and record BI Server, BI Presentation Server, BI Cluster Controller and other BI target metrics, and define thresholds and events against those metrics
  • The ability to connect to the BI repository database tables, to read for example the BI scheduler information about failed iBot executions and use it to alert you
  • The ability to connect to the DAC repository, and then graph out ETL run information such as execution time, number of errors and so forth
  • Record configuration settings, and then report on what’s changed for a target configuration compared to the previous settings

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So now that the BI Management Pack is back with OEM12cR2, what do you get with it? Well you get everything that you had before, plus some new features:

  • The ability to discover, and then monitor, Essbase installations
  • All the new functionality around WebLogic (albeit with the requirement to license the WebLogic Management Pack)
  • Compatibility with OBIEE 11g, along with continuing support for 10g

The screenshots below show some of these features in use, with the new EM12cR2 “Fusion” look and feel for the web console.

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So how do we get EM12cR2 connecting to OBIEE, and make use of some of the new BI Management Pack features; also, how do we register an OBIEE installation with it, and how does it work with a BI Apps installation, or even about Exalytics? Come back tomorrow when we’ll cover off the installation and configuration parts of the product.

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January 7, 2013   Rittman Mead

Rittman Mead BI Forum 2013 Call for Papers now Open!

I’m pleased to announce that the call for papers for the 5th annual Rittman Mead BI Forum is now open, with abstracts being accepted through to January 31st, 2013.

Last year’s BI Forum was the biggest and best ever, running in Brighton, UK and Atlanta, GA in May 2012. This year we’re back again at the Hotel Seattle, Brighton, and moving venues in Atlanta to the Georgia Tech Hotel and Conference Center. As in previous years, the BI Forum is centred around OBIEE and related products such as Oracle Data Integrator, Oracle Endeca, Oracle Essbase and Oracle Database, as well as technologies and concepts such as big data, BI methodology, and BI “best practices”.  What makes this event unique is the audience and its size – we keep the numbers to around sixty attendees at each event, the audience is at intermediate-to-expert level, there’s no marketing or sales presentations, the atmosphere is informal, and we concentrate as much on networking and discussions as we do on the actual sessions.

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 We’ve had some fantastic speakers over the years, presenting on all aspects of OBIEE development, product internals, case studies and project approaches, and we’re proud to have a speaker mix that includes industry experts, Oracle product managers, and presenters that were previously unknown but have gone on to take “best speaker” award. For each of the two events we’ll generally select eight one-hour presentations, and three TED-style ten-minute sessions, and nearer the event we’ll invite suggestions on what this year’s debate will be.

For now though, the call for papers is now open, and you can propose presentations for either the Brighton event, the Atlanta event, or both. At the end of January we’ll invite anyone thinking of attending to vote for their favourite presentations, and we’ll take those votes, along with a bit of “curating” from myself, and publish the agenda.

The call for papers website is here : Rittman Mead BI Forum 2013 Call for Papers – and abstracts will be accepted through to the end of January 2013. 

For a roundup of last year’s BI Forum events, including details of the sessions and presentation downloads, you can visit the BI Forum 2012 roundup page on our blog. Any questions, just drop me an email at mark.rittman@rittmanmead.com.

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October 3, 2012   Rittman Mead

BI, Data Warehousing and Data Integration News from Oracle Openworld 2012

This week is Oracle Openworld week in San Francisco, USA, with around 50,000 attendees attending Openworld itself, Java One and fringe events such as Oaktable world. Rittman Mead have had ten sessions during the week, covering topics such as OBIEE, Endeca, data warehousing, Essbase and EPM, Exalyics and Oracle Advanced Analytics, with links to our presentation downloads below (links will be added as presentations are given):

It’s also a good opportunity for us to attend the various product roadmap sessions, talk to the product managers and catch-up with our friends and colleagues in the industry. Jon Mead posted an update earlier in the week on the first few days, but what I’d like to go through in this posting is some of the product news from the week, focusing on OBIEE, Endeca, Data Integrator and the BI Applications.

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Before we get onto those products though, the major non-BI news this week was around Oracle Database 12c, Oracle Exadata X3 Database In-Memory Machine, and Oracle Public Cloud. Many people (including myself) were expecting Oracle to formally announce and launch Database 12c this week, but it’s been a sort-of strange “non-launch” this week with the product described in a fair bit of detail, but not formally launched with the accompanying white papers on oracle.com, detailed articles on their website and so forth. In fact, formally launching a product in that way creates a number of obligations to release the product within a certain timeframe, so by announcing but not launching the product Oracle can get the (expected) word out whilst giving themselves a bit more latitude around when the product actually becomes available. In terms of the database and in particular data warehousing new features, some ones that were called out were:

  • Adaptive query optimization – sounded like explain plans being able to evolve mid-query (which could be interesting when doing some tuning)
  • New partitioning abilities such as operations on multiple partitions, ability to mass-partition an unpartitioned table etc – Jonathan Lewis has a good article on this
  • New online DDL operations such as partition move
  • Asynchronous partitioned global index maintenance
  • Out-of-place refresh and synchronous refresh for MVs
  • In-database MapReduce and Hadoop (interesting…)
  • New In-Database predictive analytics
  • Further embedding of R in the database (see my posting later in the week on R and Oracle R Enterprise)
  • Automatic data compression (may be Exadata only) – database reviews data usage and selects from compression for archive, read or read/write
  • Pluggable databases – a form of database virtualisation where the overall database “root” is called a container database, whilst the virtualised/hosted instances are called “pluggable databases”, aimed primarily at the cloud/multi-tenant/consolidation space

The big news though was around Oracle Exadata X3 Database “In-Memory Machine”. The idea here is that X3 is an update to Oracle’s database “engineered system” line with, this time around, 26TB of RAM on a full-rack machine and the overall product positioned as an “in-memory” database server, with disk being used to supplement the main memory store. Whilst this is certainly impressive and not to be sniffed at, it’s slightly disingenuous to call it an “in-memory” database as only 4TB of the overall 26TB of memory is DRAM, with the rest being flash memory – a bit like RAM on your laptop compared to memory in a USB memory stick. Each server within the overall Exadata rack has one eighth of this total memory, meaning that a typical Exadata server has 1/2 TB of RAM (plus all the flash memory) compared to 1TB of RAM for an Exalytics server (and no flash memory). So we won’t be going looking for a refund on our Exalytics server yet (of which there was no real news about an Exalytics v2) but certainly it’ll be one more product to compete against SAP Hana with, and if someone gave us one for free we’d certainly be all over it. But not quite 26TB of RAM as you’d normally think of it, and you still need Exalytics for hosting TimesTen and Essbase.

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So on to OBIEE, Endeca and Advanced Analytics. Versions 11.1.1.7 and 11.1.1.8 were talked about at the BI Roadmap & Strategy talk, with 11.1.1.7 likely to feature installation within IBM WebSphere as an option, and with new visualisations coming along such as:

  • Interactive Trellis – ability to draw selection boxes around sets of trellis cells to include, exclude data from the view
  • In-line Planning – the example shown was around revenue simulation, where sliders could be used to vary # of sales people, revenue, hours etc with Essbase in the background then varying a projected profit figure displayed on the screen as the “tip” of a tree-like structure
  • Motion chart – augmenting existing time controls and designed to show trends over time
  • Heatmap – a grid of coloured cells showing different shades of base colours (red, green etc) to reveal distribution and hidden patterns
  • Timeline Analysis – represents key events over a particular period and reveals supporting details as required
  • Histogram / Chip Display – a variation on the trellis chart / sparkline chart plotting density, and supporting estimation by showing a visual impression of the distribution of data
  • Treemap – shows patterns in data by displaying hierarchical (tree-structured) data as sets of nested rectangles
  • Updates to the thematic maps and hierarchy wheel visualisations
  • Performance tiles, freeze headers for tables, waterfall and stacked bar charts, precision layers, improved printing, full-featured Excel interaction

BI Mobile was talked about, with the 11.1.1.6.2 BP1 “BI Mobile HD” version being showcased and talk about more specialised, job-specific mobile applications called “BI Mobile Solutions” that take elements of Oracle BI Mobile and embed it in function-specific, pre-built applications (including Windows Mobile and Android) apps. Nothing on dates or how these products would be distributed, but coupled with an announcement in a separate session about making the BI Mobile application available as a static library for embedding in security wrappers provided by the likes of Bitzer Mobile, it seems likely that Oracle are focusing on mobile as a first-class delivery platform for BI and looking to address some of the remaining shortcomings of their more general purpose BI Mobile app.

The other major announcement for OBIEE was around SmartView replacing BI Office as OBIEE’s MS Office client. BI Office has been lacking for a while now whilst SmartView, though technically compatible with OBIEE wasn’t really suitable as a replacement for BI Office. OBIEE 11.1.1.7 looks likely to introduce an updated version of SmartView that will support migration from BI Office, and will work as an Office front-end for both OBIEE and the Hyperion Tools, covering MS Word, MS Excel and MS Powerpoint. Should be interesting to see when it comes out.

Endeca and the BI Apps also go their own mention and, in the case of BI Apps, roadmap presentation. No real new news on either product (we covered the BI Apps product roadmap in a three-part series earlier in the year, available here, here and here) but it was good to hear Florian Schouten talk about where the BI Apps user interface is going post 11g, and to hear the search/discovery and unstructured analytics message getting out to the audience for Endeca. R, and Oracle R Enterprise also got a mention at many sessions, and I’m looking forward to delivering my combined OBIEE / Endeca and Oracle R Enterprise on Exalytics talk at Openworld later today. So positive words and lots around visualisations for Oracle’s BI tools at Openworld.

My other main interest for this year’s Openworld was around data integration, big data and advanced analytics, and in several sessions Oracle’s big data strategy was set out similar to the diagram below.

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Key elements here that may not be apparent to readers immersed in the “big data” story include:

  • Oracle Big Data Appliance (a large, full-rack server running various Oracle “big data” tools and the Cloudera distribution of Hadoop and MapReduce) acts as the collection point for the mass of machine data, social media conversations and other “big data” data flows and uses techniques such as MapReduce to condense this data down into something suitable for loading into Exadata, via Oracle’s Big Data Connectors (and over InfiniBand for high-bandwidth loading)
  • Exadata then acts as the down-stream storage system of record for this condensed information, with Endeca then supporting unstructured/discovery-type analytics, Exalytics (again via InfiniBand) performing traditional dashboard and OLAP-style analytics, and RTD supporting decisioning and predictive modelling.
  • All of these tools fit into the canonical acquire-organise-analyze-decide big data analytics approach

Big Data Connectors are a key part also of Oracle’s Data Integration strategy, with ODI providing the link between Big Data Appliance and Exadata, and in-general moving and orchestrating data across the whole Oracle product stack, in a process Oracle have termed “fast data”.

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The ODI product roadmap and futures session covered the use of ODI with big data and went through some of the release themes for future versions of the product, which look likely to pan out like this:

  • ODI 11.1.1.7 – due around the autumn/ fall of 2012 – will focus on XML handling and parsing (a welcome bit of news)
  • ODI 12c – probably due in 2013 at some point – will be the OWB/ODI conversion release, featuring a “developer jumpstart” that will allow the tool to be switched between pure old-style ODI and the new “mappings”-based ODI/OWB convergence approach

ODI 11.1.1.7 is also likely to be the release that the BI Apps team will use to extend ETL support to this product, a topic again at I covered in my BI Apps roadmap postings earlier in the year. ODI 12c is going to be the most significant release, with the concept of interfaces going away an instead an OWB-style approach being used where mappings can contain multiple steps, objects like variables will appear in the mapping and be configurable using the mapping UI, and many of the concepts used in OWB brought across to ODI. Expect more details once 2013 comes along, and also details on how optional migration from OWB will become available as a feature within the tool.

So that’s in in terms of updates from me, with the time now 10.45am on the Wednesday and my last presentation, on Exalytics and Big Data Analytics, due at 5pm later today. Have a safe journey home if you’re also over in San Francisco, and expect a posting from me in the next few days on using OBIEE, Endeca and Oracle R Enterprise on the Exalytics platform based on today’s talk.

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July 13, 2012   Rittman Mead

Looking Towards the BI Apps 11g Part 3 : Preparing for BI Apps 11g

In the previous two postings in this three-part series, we’ve looked at the Oracle BI Applications product roadmap, and what new features and components the 11g release is likely to use. In this final posting, we’ll try and answer a question that we often get asked by customers and BI Apps developers – what can we do now to prepare ourselves for upgrading to the BI Apps 11g? As a quick refresher, here’s the links to the other postings in the series:

In the previous posting on the BI Apps product roadmap, we talked about how Oracle plan to support both Informatica PowerCenter, and Oracle Data Integrator, as data integration tools for loading the BI Apps data warehouse. Current plans are for the first converged release of BI Apps 11g that covers both Apps Unlimited and Fusion Apps sources to use ODI as the data integration tool, with support for Informatica to come later in the twelve month period. As there aren’t plans for migration tools to move you from Informatica to ODI, and Oracle have said that they won’t make customers move from Informatica to ODI, what does this mean for customers and developers using the current 7.9.x series of products?

My view is that if you’re currently using Informatica to load the BI Apps (as everyone will be), there’s little point in planning a move over to ODI. If you’ve got lots invested in customisations, your development team know Informatica well, so forget about ODI and just extend what you’ve got – you’ll be able to automatically upgrade and migrate your current Informatica repository and mappings to the 11g release, and support for Informatica as an ETL tool will be continuing for as long as we all care about it. The only reasons I’d have for planning a move to ODI would be if your existing BI Apps 7.9.x setup clearly needs to be junked and re-done; possibly because you’re on an old Siebel Business Analytics release, you’ve not brought any ERP content in anyway, and your plan is to start from fresh with the 11g BI Apps release – at this point, it’s probably going to be easier and cheaper to go with ODI and you can also use the tool, and skills, for other DW and data integration projects in your organisation.

As a developer, you could use this dual-support for ODI and Informatica as an excuse to learn ODI, but realistically unless your organisation uses the 11g upgrade to completely re-implement your BI Apps system (leaving behind all existing customisations, historic data and so on) you won’t get to use it on an ODI project. That said – ODI is clearly the tool, outside of the BI Apps, that Oracle see as strategic for their data integration needs, so it’s a very useful skill to have and one that we’re training all of our developers up on.

Of course if you’re not currently a BI Apps customer, but you’re planning on moving to BI Apps 11g some time in the future, then I would recommend using ODI over Informatica for your new installation, with a few caveats. ODI clearly will be the data integration tool that Oracle will put most effort into with regards to the BI Apps, in terms of their own development work, first opportunities for integration and so on, but beware of the “small print” when looking at what ODI will cover in terms of modules, target databases and so on; it wouldn’t surprise me, for example, to find that ODI is supported as the data integration tool for BI Apps 11g but only initially with Oracle Database as the target platform, or only for the mainstream ERP/CRM modules but not the industry vertical applications. So if you do plan to use ODI from the get-go when support for it arrives in BI Apps 11g, make sure it covers your source and target platforms and your choice of modules, and also expect to be a bit of a “pioneer” in terms of working through the BI Apps-specific kinks in ODI at least for the first few releases.

So apart from decisions around ETL tool strategy, what else can customers and developers do to best prepare themselves for an upgrade of their 7.9.x BI Apps system to 11g, once this becomes possible? Most of the recommendations are around the customisation process, and are really general “best practices” in this area that hopefully you are following anyway:

  • Where possible, try and make as few customisations as possible to your BI Apps system, as it’s moving these customisations through the upgrade process that takes the most time
  • If you have to make customisations, keep them as simple as possible, doing as many customisations as possible in the dashboard and RPD and only if really needed, the OBAW and ETL process. 
  • When creating ETL customisations, follow the “best practices” of adding extra columns as X_ columns, keeping custom version of mappings in their own custom folders, follow the naming standards and make sure you maintain key columns like INTEGRATION_ID, ROW_WID and so on – doing this keeps everything separate, and it makes it easier to follow the upgrade guidelines that Oracle publish with each new release.
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  • When you make customisations, ensure you document them; not only what you did but why you did it, and make sure the documentation covers changes to the RPD and catalog as well as the Informatica mappings. The main reason why I see BI Apps systems that are effectively impossible to upgrade is because there’s been no prior control over the customisation process and no documentation, and therefore there’s no way of working out what needs to be brought through to the upgraded system or how to recreate the customisations (or indeed, if they need to be recreated at all)

We covered the BI Apps customisation process in a couple of postings a few years ago, and the process has changed since the Siebel Analytics days; but if you’ve customised your system in at least the standard way, separating customised mappings into their own folders and documenting everything including the business logic behind them, you’re in a much better starting position than many customers.

The other thing you can do to prepare for Oracle BI Apps 11g is to get yourself onto the 7.9.6.3 release as soon as possible (or 7.9.6.4 when it comes out), upgrading yourself step-by-step through releases until you get to there. The 7.9.6.3 release uses OBIEE 11g as the platform, uses Fusion Middleware (application roles) security, and given that release dates are always a bit flexible you’ll not be dependent on moving to the full BI Apps 11g release to start making use of OBIEE 11g platform technology such as better pivot tables, mapping, Oracle BI Mobile and Oracle Exalytics.

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As a short-cut you could just upgrade your BI platform to OBIEE 11g but not upgrade your BI Apps, but if you’re planning to adopt BI Apps 11g in due course anyway, you might as well make a start now on the full upgrade path.

So there we are; over the past three days I’ve tried to answer a few questions we’re getting from customers and developers over the BI Apps product roadmap, and what we can do now to get ready. Keep an eye on the blog for more news and analysis around the BI Apps 11g as the converged release comes on-stream, and contact us now if you’d like any help with upgrades, implementation or training around the Oracle BI Applications.

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May 24, 2012   Rittman Mead

OBIA Roadmap

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