Tag Archives: Oracle BI Apps
Practical Tips for Oracle BI Applications 11g Implementations
As with any product or technology, the more you use it the more you learn about the “right” way to do things. Some of my experiences implementing Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 11g have led me to compile a few tips that will improve the overall process for installation and configuration and make the application more maintainable in the future. You can find me at KScope15 in Hollywood, FL beginning June 21st, presenting this exact topic. In this post I want to give you a quick preview of a couple of the topics in my presentation.
Data Extract Type – Choose Wisely
Choosing how the data is extracted from the source and loaded to the data warehouse target is an important part of the overall ETL performance in Oracle BI Applications 11g. In BI Apps, there are three extract modes to choose from:
- JDBC mode
This default mode will use the generic Loading Knowledge Modules (LKM) in Oracle Data Integrator to extract the data from the source and stream it through the ODI Agent, then down to the target. The records are streamed through the agent to translate datatypes between heterogeneous data sources. That makes the JDBC mode useful only when the source database is non-Oracle (since the target for BI Apps will always be an Oracle database). - Database link mode
If your source is Oracle, then the database link mode is the best option. This mode uses the database link functionality built-in to the Oracle database, allowing the source data to be extracted across this link. This eliminates the need for an additional translation of the data as occurs in the JDBC mode. - SDS mode
This should really be called “GoldenGate mode”, but I’m sure Oracle wants to keep their options open. In this mode, Oracle GoldenGate is used to replicate source transactions to the target data warehouse in what is called a Source Dependent Data Store (SDS) schema. This SDS schema mimics the source schema(s), allowing the SDE process to extract from the DW local SDS schema rather than across the network to the actual source.
If the use of GoldenGate is an option, it’s hands-down better than JDBC mode should you be extracting data from a non-Oracle source. (Have a look at my OTN ArchBeat 2-minute Tech Tip as I attempt beat the clock while discussing when to use GoldenGate with BI Apps!)
Let’s go into a bit more detail about using GoldenGate with BI Applications. Because the SDS is setup to look exactly like the source schema, the Oracle Data Integrator pre-built Interfaces can change which source they are using from within the Loading Knowledge Module (LKM) by evaluating a variable (IS_SDS_DEPLOYED) at various points throughout the LKM. Using this approach, the GoldenGate integration can be easily enabled at any point, even after initial configuration. The Oracle BI Applications team did a great job of utilizing the features of ODI that allow the logical layer to be abstracted from the physical layer and data source connection. For further information about how to implement Oracle GoldenGate with Oracle BI Applications 11g, check out the OTN Technical article I wrote which describes the steps for implementation in detail.
Disaster Recovery
If the data being reported on in BI Applications is critical to your business, you probably want a disaster recovery process. This will involve an entirely different installation on a full server stack located somewhere that is not near the production servers. Now, there are many different approaches to DR with each of the products involved in BI Applications – OBIEE, ODI, databases, etc., but I think this approach is more simple than many others.
The installation of BI Apps would occur on each site (primary and standby) as standalone installations. It’s critical that you have a well defined, hopefully scripted and automated, process for installation and configuration, since everything will need to be exactly the same between the two sites. Looking at the architecture diagram above, you can see the data warehouse, ODI repository, and BIACM repository schemas will be replicated from primary to standby via Oracle Dataguard. The OBIEE metadata repositories are not replicated due to much of the configuration information being stored in files rather than the database schema.
With the installation and configuration identical, any local, internal URLs will be setup to use the local site URL (e.g. http://biapps.rittmanmead-primary.com). The external URLs, such as the top-level site (e.g. http://biapps.rittmanmead.com/biacm) or database JDBC connection URLs, will all use canonical names (CNAMEs) as the URL. A CNAME is really just an alias used in the DNS, allowing an easy switch when redirecting from one site to another. For example, the CNAME biapps.rittmanmead-primary.com will have an alias of biapps.rittmanmead.com. This alias will switch to point to biapps.rittmanmead-standby.com during the failover / switchover process.
We can now run through a few simple steps to perform the failover or switchover to the standby server.
- Update Global CNAMEs
- Switch primary database via DataGuard
- Update the Web Catalog and Application Role assignments
- Start NodeManager, OHS, WebLogic AdminServer
- Update Embedded LDAP User GUID in ODI (if necessary)
- Start BI and ODI Managed Servers
- Update and Deploy the RPD
- Start the BI Services
Looks pretty straightforward, right? With the appropriate attention to detail up front during the installation and configuration, it becomes simple to maintain and perform the DR switchover and failover. I’ll go into more detail on these topics and others, such as installation and configuration, LDAP integration, and high availability, during my presentation at KScope15 later this month. I hope to see you there!
Last Chance to Register for the Brighton Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015!
It’s just a week to go until the start of the Brighton Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015, with the optional one-day masterclass starting on Wednesday, May 6th at 10am and the event opening with a reception and Oracle keynote later in the evening. Spaces are still available if you want to book now, but we can’t guarantee places past this Friday so register now if you’re planning to attend.
As a reminder, here’s some earlier blog posts and articles about events going on at the Brighton event, and at the Atlanta event the week after:
- Announcing the Special Guest Speakers for Brighton & Atlanta BI Forum 2015
- More on the Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015 Masterclass : “Delivering the Oracle Big Data and Information Management Reference Architecture”
- Announcing the BI Forum 2015 Data Visualisation Challenge
- RM BI Forum 2015 : Justification Letters for Employers
- Realtime BI Show with Kevin and Stewart – BI Forum 2015 Special!
- Previewing Three Sessions at the Brighton Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015
- Previewing Four Sessions at the Atlanta Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015
- BI Forum 2015 Preview — OBIEE Regression Testing, and Data Discovery with the ELK stack
We’re also running our first “Data Visualisation Challenge” at both events, where we’re asking attendees to create their most impressive and innovative data visualisation within OBIEE using the Donors Choose dataset, with the rule being that you can use any OBIEE or related technology as long as the visualisation runs with OBIEE and can respond to dashboard prompt controls. We’re also opening it up to OBIEE running as part of Oracle BI Cloud Service (BICS), so if you want to give Visual Analyser a spin within BICS we’d be interested in seeing the results.
Registration is still open for the Atlanta BI Forum event too, running the week after Brighton on the 13th-15th May 2015 at the Renaissance Atlanta Midtown hotel. Full details of both events are on the event homepage, with the registration links for Brighton and Atlanta given below.
- Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015, Brighton – May 6th – 8th 2015
- Hosted at the Hotel Seattle, Brighton Marina.
- Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015, Atlanta – May 13th – 15th 2015
- Hosted at the Renaissance Atlanta Midtown Hotel, Atlanta.
OBIEE and the Oracle Database 12c In-Memory Option – Article and New Services from Rittman Mead
My latest Business Intelligence column for Oracle Magazine is on the In-Memory Option for Oracle Database 12c, and using it to speed-up dashboards and reports in OBIEE11g. In the article I go through the basics of the in-memory option explaining how it adds in-memory columnar processing to the standard Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, and then I take the Airline Flight Delays dashboard in the OBIEE11g SampleApp v406 and enable it for in-memory processing; for queries that go against the base detail-level tables in the Oracle Database queries run roughly twice-as-fast, whilst queries going against aggregate tables return data instantaneously, all without any need to alter the underlying database schema or migrate to a new database engine.
To my mind there are two main groups of customers who could benefit from moving to Oracle Database 12c and the In-Memory Option; customers who are currently using earlier version of Oracle Database with regular disk-stored row-based storage (or indeed customers using other databases, for example Teradata or Microsoft SQL Server), and customers who’ve implemented Oracle Exalytics with TimesTen as the in-memory database cache, and who would now like to take advantage of the additional features and lower cost-of-ownership with in-memory processing directly in the Oracle Database.
If you already have licenses for Oracle Database Enterprise Edition you’ll only need to add the additional In-Memory Option license to enable these new features, whereas if you’re using TimesTen on Exalytics there are special terms for customers who wish to trade-in those licenses for Oracle Database Enterprise Edition and In-Memory Options licenses – and once you’ve moved over to Oracle Database 12c and the In-Memory Option, you’ll benefit from:
- Access to full Oracle SQL including advanced analytics functions, aggregation and transformation capabilities
- Moving to Oracle’s strategic database technology for in-memory analytics and Exalytics in-memory aggregate caching
- Compatibility with existing Oracle Database functionality, making it easy to move reporting databases into Exalytics and enable for in-memory analytics
- Columnar processing, an alternative to traditional row-based storage that’s better suited to BI-style filtering against attribute values
- Full compatibility with all reporting and ETL tools that support access to Oracle Database data sources
- Additional optimisations around aggregation, table joining and other BI-style queries
- Faster dashboards, more interactive reporting and less maintenance compared to maintaining TimesTen
To get you started with either of these options, Rittman Mead have created two packages for customers looking to adopt Oracle Database 12c In-Memory Option; one for customers on traditional data warehouse databases looking to use In-memory for the first time, and another for customers using Exalytics who want to migrate from Oracle TimesTen. Full details of these two packages are now up on our website at our Supercharge OBIEE with the Oracle 12c In-Memory Option web page, or you can contact us at enquiries@rittmanmead.com to talk through your particular requirements in more detail.
Take Part in the BI Survey 15, and Have Your Voice Heard!
Long-term readers of this blog will know that we’ve supported for many years the BI Survey, an independent survey of BI tools customers and implementors. Rittman Mead have no (financial or other) interest in the BI Survey or its organisers, but we like the way it gathers in detailed data on which tools work best and when, and it’s been a useful set of data for companies such as Oracle when they prioritise their investment in tools such as OBIEE, Essbase and the BI Applications.
Here’s the invite text and link to the survey:
“We would like to invite you to participate in The BI Survey 15, the world’s largest annual survey of business intelligence (BI) users.
BARC’s annual survey gathers input from thousands of organizations to analyze their buying decisions, implementation cycles and the benefits they achieve from using BI software.
As a participant, you will:
- Receive a summary of the results from the survey when it is published
- Be entered into a draw to win one of ten $50 Amazon vouchers
- Ensure that your experiences are included in the final analyses
Click here to take part
Business and technical users, as well as vendors and consultants, are all welcome to participate.
You will be able to answer questions on your usage of a BI product from any vendor and your experience with your service provider.
The BI Survey 15 is strictly vendor-independent: It is not sponsored by any vendor and the results are analyzed and published independently.
Your answers will be used anonymously and your personal details will not be passed on to software vendors or other third parties.
The BI Survey 15 should take about 20 minutes to complete. For further information, please contact Adrian Wyszogrodzki at BARC (awyszogrodzki@barc.de).Thank you in advance for taking part.”
Previewing Three Sessions at the Brighton Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015
As well as a one-day masterclass by myself and Jordan Meyer, a data visualisation challenge, keynotes and product update sessions from Oracle and our guest speaker from the Oracle Data Warehouse Global Leaders Program, the Brighton Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015 has of course a fantastic set of speakers and sessions on a wide range of topics around Oracle BI, data warehousing and big data. In this blog post I’m going to highlight three sessions at the Brighton BI Forum, and later in the week I’ll be doing the same with three sessions from the Atlanta event – so let’s start with a speaker who’s new to the BI Forum but very well-known to the UK OBIEE community – Steve Devine.
Steve is one of the most experienced OBIEE practitioners in the Europe, recently with Edenbrook / Hitachi Consulting, Claremont and now working with Altius in the UK. In his session at the Brighton BI Forum 2015 Steve’s going to talk to us about what’s probably the hottest topic around OBIEE at the moment in his session “The Art and Science of Creating Effective Data Visualisations”. Over to Steve:
“These days, news publications and the internet are packed with eye-catching data visualisations and infographics – the New York Times, the Guardian or Information Is Beautiful to name but a few. Yet the scientists and statisticians tell us that everything could be a bar chart, and that nothing should ever be a pie chart! How do we make sense of these seemingly disparate, contrasting views?
My presentation provides an introduction on how graphic design principles complement the more science orientated aspects of data viz design. It will focus on a simple-to-apply design framework that brings all of these principles together, enabling you to create visualisations that have the right balance of aesthetics and function. By example, I’ll apply this framework to traditional BI scenarios such as operational and exploratory dashboards, as well as new areas that BI tools are just beginning to support such as commentary and storytelling. I’ll also look at how well Oracle’s BI tools address today’s data visualisation needs, and how they compare to the competition.”
On the topic of data visualisation, I’m also very pleased to have Daniel Adams from Rittman Mead’s US office coming over to the Brighton BI Forum to talk about effective dashboard design. Daniel’s been working with Rittman Mead clients in the US and Europe for the past year helping them apply data visualisation and dashboard design best practices to their dashboards and reports, and he’ll be sharing some of his methods and approaches in his session “User Experience First: Guided information and attractive dashboard design”:
“Most front end OBI developers can give users exactly what they ask for, but will that lead to insightful dashboards that improve data culture and escalate the user xperience? One the biggest mistakes I see as a designer, are dashboards that are a cluttered collection of tables and graphs. Poorly designed dashboards can prevent users from adopting a BI implementation, diminishing the ROI.
In this session, attendees will learn to design dashboards that inform, instruct, and lead to smart discussion and decisions. This includes learning to visualize data to convey meaning, implementing attractive visual design, and creating a layout that leads users through a target rich environment. We will walk through a series of “before” and “after” dashboards that demonstrate the difference between meeting a requirement, and using proven UX and UI design concepts to make OBIEE dashboards insightful and enjoyable to use.”
Finally, someone I’m very pleased to have over to the Brighton BI Forum for the first time is Gerd Aiglstorfer. I first met Gerd at an Oracle event in Germany several years ago, and since then I’ve noticed several of his blogs and the launch of his Oracle University Expert Sessions on OBIEE development, administration and RPD modelling. Gerd is one of Europe’s premier experts in OBIEE and Oracle BI, and for his inaugural BI Forum presentation he’ll be deep-diving into one of the most complex topics around repository modeling in his session “Driving OBIEE Join Semantics on Multi Star Queries as User”:
“Multi star queries are a very useful and powerful functionality of OBIEE. But when I examine reports developed by business users or report developers I often find some misunderstandings on how it is working and queries are build by OBIEE. As additionally the execution strategy in OBIEE 11.1.1.7 has changed to generate SQL of multi star queries I had the idea to introduce the topic at the BI Forum. Thus, it’s a quite interesting topic to go into technical details of OBIEE SQL generator engine.
I’ll introduce how users can drive join semantics on common fields in multi star queries. You will get a full picture of the functionality for a better understanding of how report creation affects SQL generation. I recognized some inconsistencies during my tests of the new OBIEE 11.1.1.7 logic in January 2014. I will demonstrate the issues and would like to discuss if you would say: “It’s a defect within the SQL generator engine” – as I do.”
Full agenda details on the Brighton Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015 can be found on the event homepage, along with details of the optional one-day masterclass on Delivering the Oracle Information Management and Big Data Reference Architecture, and our first-ever Data Visualisation Bake-Off, using the DonorsChoose.org dataset.
