Earlier in the week we’ve looked at the developer features within Oracle BI Cloud Service (BICS), aimed at departmental users who want the power of OBIEE 11g without the need to stand-up their own infrastructure. We looked at the process of uploading spreadsheets and other data to the Oracle Database Schema Service that accompanies BICS, how you create the BI Repository that translates the tables and columns you upload into measures, attributes and hierarchies, and then took a brief look at how dashboards and reports are created and then shared with other users in your department. If you’re coming in late, here’s the links to the previous posts in the series:

• Introduction to Oracle BI Cloud Service : Product Overview
• Introduction to Oracle BI Cloud Service : Provisioning Data
• Introduction to Oracle BI Cloud Service : Creating the Repository
• Introduction to Oracle BI Cloud Service : Building Dashboards & Reports
• Introduction to Oracle BI Cloud Service : Service Administration

One of the design goals for BICS was to reduce the amount of administration work an end-user has to perform, and to simplify and consolidate any tasks that they do have to do. Behind the scenes BICS actually comprises a BI environment, and a database environment, with most of the administration work being concerned with the BI one. Let’s start by looking at the service administration page that you see when you first log into the BICS environment as an administrator, with the screenshot below showing the overview page for the overall service.

Oracle BI Cloud Service is part of Oracle’s overall Oracle Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, with BICS being made up of a database service and a BI service. The screenshot above shows the overall availability of these two services over the past two weeks, and you click on either the database service or the BI service to drill into more detail. Let’s click on the BI service first.

The BI service dashboard page shows the same availability statuses again, along with a few graphs to show usage over that period. Also on this page are details of the start and end date for the service contract, details of the SFTP user account you’ll need to for some import/archive operations, and a link to Presentation Services for this instance, to launch the OBIEE Home Page.

The OBIEE home page, as we saw in previous posts in this series, has menu items for model editing, data uploading and creating reports and dashboards. What it also has though is a Manage menu item, as shown in the screenshot below, that takes you through to an administration function that lets you set up application roles and backup/restore the system.

Application roles are the way that OBIEE groups permissions and privileges and then assigns them to sets of users. With on-premise OBIEE the only way to manage application roles is through Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control, but with BICS this functionality has been moved into OBIEE proper so that non-system administrators can perform this task. The list of users you work with are the ones defined for your service (tenancy) and using this tool you can assign them to existing application roles, create new ones, or group one set of roles within another. Users themselves are created as part of the instance creation process, with the minimum (license) number of users for an instance being 10.

The Snapshots tab on this same Service Console page provides access to a new, system-wide snapshot and restore function that provides the means to version your system, restore it from a backup and transport a dev/test environment to your production instance. As I mentioned in previous postings in the series, each tenant for BICS comes with two instances, once for dev/test and one for prod, and the snapshot facility gives you a means to copy everything from one environment into another, for when you’ve completed development and testing and want to put your dashboards into production.

Taking a snapshot, as shown in the screenshot above, creates an archive file containing your RPD, the catalog and all the security settings, and you can store a number of snapshots within each environments, giving you a (very coarse-grained) versioning ability. What you can also do is download these snapshots as what are called “BI Archive” files as shown in the screenshot below, and its these archive files that you can then upload into your other instance to give you your code promotion process – note however that applying an archive file overwrites everything that was there before, so you’ll need to be careful doing this when users start creating reports in your production environment – really, it’s just a once-only code promotion facility followed then by a way of backing up and restoring your environments.

Note also that you’ll separately need to backup and restore any database elements, as these aren’t automatically included in the BI archive process. Backup and restoration of database elements is done via the separate database instance service page shown below, where you can export the whole schema or just parts of it, and then retrieve the export file via an SFTP transfer.

So that’s in in terms of BICS administration, and for our initial look at the BI Cloud Service platform. Rittman Mead are of course offering services around BICS and cloud BI in-general so contact us if you’d like to give BICS a spin, and keep an eye on the blog over the next few weeks where we’ll take you through the example BICS application we built, reporting against Salesforce.com data using their REST API.

This week we’ve been looking at the new Oracle BI Cloud Service (BICS), the cloud version of OBIEE11g that went GA at the start of this week. Rittman Mead were part of the beta program for BICS and spend a couple of weeks building a sample BICS application to put the product through its paces, creating a reporting application for Salesforce.com that pulled in its data via the Salesforce REST API and staged it in the Oracle Database Schema Service that comes with BICS. Earlier in the week we looked at how data was uploaded or transferred into the accompanying database schema, and yesterday looked at how the repository was created using the new thin-client data modeller. Today, we’ll look at how you create the dashboards and reports that your users will use, using the Analysis and Dashboard Editors that are part of the service. If you’re arriving mid-way through the series, here’s the links to the other posts in the series:

• Introduction to Oracle BI Cloud Service : Product Overview
• Introduction to Oracle BI Cloud Service : Provisioning Data
• Introduction to Oracle BI Cloud Service : Creating the Repository
• Introduction to Oracle BI Cloud Service : Building Dashboards & Reports
• Introduction to Oracle BI Cloud Service : Service Administration

So, that wraps-up our quick tour around the analysis and dashboard creation parts of Oracle BI Cloud Service; tomorrow, to finish-up the series we’ll look at the administration elements of BICS including new self-service application role provisioning, tools for administering and monitoring the instance and for backing-up and migrating content from one instance to another.

Earlier in this series we’ve looked at the overall product proposition for Oracle BI Cloud Service (BICS), and how you upload data to the Database Schema Service that comes with it. Today, we’re going to look at what’s involved in creating the BI Repository that holds the metadata about your logical tables, calculations and dimension hierarchies, using the new thin-client data modeller that like the rest of BICS runs entirely within your web browser. For anyone coming into the series mid-way, here’s the links to the other posts in the series:

• Introduction to Oracle BI Cloud Service : Product Overview
• Introduction to Oracle BI Cloud Service : Provisioning Data
• Introduction to Oracle BI Cloud Service : Creating the Repository
• Introduction to Oracle BI Cloud Service : Building Dashboards & Reports
• Introduction to Oracle BI Cloud Service : Service Administration

So anyone familiar with OBIEE will know that a central part of the product, and the part of it that makes it easy for users to work with their data, is the business-orientated semantic model that you create over your source data. Held within what’s called the “BI Repository” and made-up of physical, logical and presentation layers, the semantic model turns what can be a complex set of source tables, joins and cross-application links into a simple to understand set of subject areas made up of fact tables and dimensions. Regular on-premise OBIEE semantic models can get pretty complex, with joins across different database types, logical tables with several different ways you can provide their data – for example, at detail-level from an Oracle data warehouse whilst at summary level, from an Essbase cube, and to edit them you use a dedicated Windows development tool called BI Administration.

Allowing these complex data models, and having a dependency on a Windows-based development tool, poses two main issues for any consumer-style version of OBIEE; first, if the aim of the service is to attract customers who want to create their systems “self-service”, you’ve got to made the repository development process a lot simpler than it currently is – you can’t expect customers to go on a course or buy my excellent book when they just want to get a dashboard up and running with the minimum fuss. You also can’t realistically expect them to install a Windows-only development tool back at the office as most of their target customers won’t have admin privileges on their workstations, or they might even be using Macs or work out of a browser; and then, even if they get it installed you’ll need to ensure there’s a network connection available to the BI Server in the cloud through their corporate firewall. Clearly, a browser-based repository creation tool was needed, ideally one that did some of the basic work automatically for the user and didn’t need hours or days of training to understand. Of course, the risk to this is that you create a repository editing tool that’s too “dumbed-down” for most developers to find useful, and we’ll consider that possibility later in the article.

So following the data upload process that we covered in yesterday’s post, we’re now in a position where we’ve got a number of tables sitting in Oracle Database Schema Service, and we’re ready to build a repository to report against them. To access the thin-client data modeller you click on the Model menu item on the BICS homepage, as shown in the screenshot below.

The modeller itself supports a simplified subset of what you can create with the full BI Administration tool. You’ve got a single source, the Oracle Database Schema Service, and a single business model. Business model tables have a logical table source as you’d normally expect, but just the one LTS is currently supported. Calculations within logical tables are supported, but they’re logical-level only (i.e. post-aggregation) with no current support for physical-level (pre-aggregation) at this point.

Level-based hierarchies within the business model are supported, including skip-level and ragged ones, and there’s support for time-series dimensions including their own editor.

Where possible, introspection is used when creating the business model components, with table joins and matching column names used to create candidate logical joins. Static and dynamic repository variables, along with session variables are supported, with the front-end also supporting presentation and request variables – so all good there.

Under the covers, each tenant within BICS has their own RPD and their own catalog, and any edits to the repository that you perform are effectively “online” edits. To make edits to an existing model the developer therefore has to first “lock” the model, make their changes and add their new entries and then validate them, and then either revert the model or publish the changes. 

In the background BICS updates the RPD using the metadata web service API for the BI Server, with the RPD it creates the same format as the ones we create on-premise, just with a smaller set of features supported through the thin-client admin tool.

As I mentioned in the first post in the series, each tenant install of BICS comes with two instances; one for development or pre-prod and one for production. To move a completed repository out of one environment into another a new feature called a “BI Archive” is used, a snapshot of your BICS system that includes both the repository, the catalog and any security objects you create. In this first version of BICS each import is total and overwrites everything that was in the instance beforehand, so there’s no incremental import or ability to selectively import just certain objects or certain reports into a new environment, meaning that you’ll lose any reports or dashboards created in production if you subsequently refresh it from dev/pre-prod – something to bear in-mind.

One other thing to be aware of is that there’s no ability to create alias tables or opaque views in the thin-client modeller, so if you want to create additional copies of dimension table for more than one dimension role, or you want to create a table using an arbitrary SELECT statement you’ll need to go into ApEx and create a database view instead – not a huge imposition as ApEx comes with tools for creating these pretty easily, but something that will lead to a more complex database model in-time. The screenshot below shows one such database view then exposed through the thin-client modeller, where you can see the SELECT statement behind it (but not alter or amend it except through ApEx).

Finally, the thin-client modeller supports row-level and subject area security, using filters or object permissions to set up manually or create by reference to application roles granted to your users. We’ll look at what’s involved in setting up security and application roles in the final post in this series, where we look at administering your BICS instance.

So, that’s a high-level view of the repository creation process; in tomorrow’s post, we’ll look at what’s involved in creating reports and dashboards.