Tag Archives: Oracle BI Apps

Kickstart Your 2016 with Rittman Mead’s Data Integration Training

Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year to all! As you begin your 2016 this January, it’s time to start planning your team’s data integration training. Look no further than Rittman Mead’s Oracle Data Integrator training course! We offer a 4 day Oracle Data Integrator 12c Bootcamp for those looking to take advantage of the latest and greatest features in ODI 12c. We also still teach our 5 day Oracle Data Integrator 11g Bootcamp, as we know sometimes it can be difficult to upgrade to the latest release and new data warehouse team members need to be brought up to speed on the product. ODI 11g is also still very much alive in Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, being the ETL technology for the 11g release of the product suite.

ODI12c training

Customized Data Integration Training

BI Apps 11g training has been a hot topic from the data integration perspective over the last couple of years. Rittman Mead have delivered custom BI Apps training for ODI developers several times just within the last year, prompting us to add a new public training course specific to this topic to our public schedule. This course walks attendees through the unique relationship between OBIEE and ODI 11g as the data integration technology, including configuration, load plan generation, and ETL customization. If you have an Oracle Business Intelligence Applications 11g team looking to enhance their ODI 11g skills, take a look at the new ODI for BI Applications course description.

The customization of training does not just apply to BI Applications, but to all aspects of Oracle Data Integration. Whether adding more details around Oracle GoldenGate installation and maintenance to the ODI 12c course, or learning about Oracle EDQ integration, the Rittman Mead data integration team of experts can work to deliver the course so your team gains the most value from its investment in Oracle Data Integration technologies. Just ask! Reach out and we can work together to create a custom course to fit your needs.

Public or Onsite Training?

Rittman Mead has several dates for each course, scheduled to be delivered out of our offices in either Atlanta, GA or Brighton, UK. Take a look here for our ODI 12c bootcamp, ODI 11g bootcamp, and ODI for BI Apps Developers offerings in the US. Look here for the same in the UK/Europe (Note: as of the writing of this blog post, the 2016 UK/Europe schedule had not been released). We also offer the same courses for delivery onsite at your company’s office, allowing our experts to come to you! Quite often our clients will combine consulting and training, ensuring they get the most out of their investment in our team of experts.

Why Rittman Mead?

Many folks in the Business Intelligence and Data Integration profession who are looking for a consulting company might think Rittman Mead only work on extremely challenging projects based on the depth of knowledge and type of problems (and solutions) we offer via our blog. The fact is, most of our projects are the “standard” data warehouse or business intelligence reporting implementations, with some of these additional challenges coming along the way. Why do I bring that up? Well, if you’re looking for the experts in Oracle Data Integration technology, with experience in both project implementation and solving challenging technical problems, then you’ve come to the right place to learn about ODI.

Unlike many other companies offering training, we don’t have a staff of educators on hand. Our trainers are the same folks that deliver projects, using the technology you’re interested in learning about, on a day-to-day basis. We offer you real world examples as we walk through our training slide deck and labs. Need to know why Oracle GoldenGate is an integral part of real-time data integration? Let me tell you about my latest client where I implemented GoldenGate and ODI. Want to know what to look out for when installing the JEE Agent in ODI 12c? We’ve done that many times – and know the tricks necessary to get it all working.

Our experts, such Jérôme Françoisse, Becky Wagner, Mark Rittman, myself, and many others, all have multiple years of experience with Oracle Data Integration implementations. Not only that, but we here at Rittman Mead truly enjoy sharing our knowledge! Whether posting to this blog, speaking at Oracle conferences, or on the OTN forums, Rittman Mead experts are always looking to teach others in order to better the Oracle Data Integration community.

If you or your company are in need of Oracle Data Integration training, please drop us a line at training@rittmanmead.com. As always, feel free to reach out to me directly on Twitter (@mRainey), LinkedIn, or via email (michael.rainey@rittmanmead.com) if you have any direct questions. See you all next year!

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Becky’s BI Apps Corner: Oracle BI Applications, where art thou?

Hello! I would like to take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Becky Wagner and I’ve been working with Rittman Mead America since the beginning of the year. I have a background in data warehousing and ETL with a state government agency, where I was part of a project upgrading from DataStage to ODI 11g with Oracle Golden Gate in Oracle’s early adopter program for Oracle BI Apps 11g. Since coming to Rittman Mead, I’ve taught several ODI 12c bootcamps, designed and delivered custom trainings for BI Apps and ODI and been involved in ODI 11g, ODI 12c projects, and OBIA 11g projects.

 

Recently, I was putting together a BI Apps for Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) custom training for a client who is upgrading BI Apps and will be using ODI for the first time. On the Virtual Machine I was building for the training, I wanted the version of Oracle BI Applications to match the client’s installation. I found that Oracle’s recent website facelifts changed the way I was used to getting older versions of software. Oracle’s Downloads and Technetwork sites both have the most recent version of Oracle BI Apps available (currently 11.1.1.10.1) but no earlier versions any longer. Edelivery has the earlier versions as well as the current version, but the site has changed enough that it took me a bit to understand how to get to the Oracle BI Apps software files to download.

 

Downloading Oracle BI Apps from Edelivery

 

From your favorite browser, go to https://edelivery.oracle.com and sign in.

Accept the Export Restrictions (of course, only after you have read, understand and agree to them.)

 

Fill in the Product* box with ‘Business Intelligence Applications’. You won’t see Business Intelligence Applications in the dropdown that appears as you start typing. What you do see are other Products that your company would have purchased to allow you to have a license of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, such as Oracle Financial Analytics or Oracle Human Resources Analytics. Select the product (or one of the products) that was purchased by your company.

Click on the Select Platform button and check the box for your appropriate platform, such as Linux x86-64 or Microsoft Windows x64 (64-bit). Then click the Select button.

Once the Product you selected is displaying in the window, click on the Continue button.

 

Now Oracle Business Intelligence 11.1.1.10.1 is showing. Interestingly, it doesn’t say Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, but currently OBIEE doesn’t have a version of 11.1.1.10.1, so we can be confident this is actually Oracle BI Apps. However, this still isn’t the Oracle BI Apps that you are looking for. Below the Available Release, you will see the option to Select Alternate Release.

This will allow you to drop down the box to select an earlier version.

With any version of Oracle BI Apps, there are several different components to download, which you can see by clicking on the triangle to the left of the Available Release. Once you have selected your desired version of Oracle BI Apps, click on the continue button to begin the download.

Please don’t forget to read the license agreements carefully and if you agree, check the box and click Continue.

 

At this point, you can now see the files to download. You can click on each blue link individually, or click the Download All button to use Oracle’s downloader tool. Also, for the Linux, Red Hat, and Solaris folks, notice at the bottom the WGET Options.

Downloading ODI for Oracle BI Apps from Edelivery

 

Get the downloads started for these files. We aren’t quite finished yet, though. ODI needs to be downloaded as well. Return to the Products page. Please note that to get the correct version of ODI, you must type in ‘Oracle Data Integrator for Oracle Business Intelligence’ (again, it probably means Oracle BI Apps, but points here for consistency at least). Select a Platform. Then click Continue.

Notice we are showing Oracle Business Intelligence 11.1.1.10.1 again. You will want to click on Select Alternate Release, and pick the same version you selected above. This will save you from interesting OPatch errors later during the install process, but I will leave those fun errors for another blog post. Then click Continue.

Rinse and repeat.

And that is how you navigate the new Oracle EDelivery site to get Oracle BI Apps download files and previous versions. I would love to hear your thoughts if you found this helpful or confusing. Also, please leave comments below if you found other alternatives for downloading earlier versions of Oracle BI Apps, and/or your suggestions for ways to rename the V#####-##.zip files to something more descriptive that better identifies the zip file. Keep an eye out for more Becky’s BI Apps Corner coming soon and if you’re interested in OBIEE or ODI training (or even a custom Oracle BI Applications course), give us a shout at training@rittmanmead.com!

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Rittman Mead at UKOUG Tech’15 Conference, Birmingham

This week Rittman Mead are very pleased to be presenting at the UK Oracle User Group’s Tech’15 Conference in Birmingham, delivering a number of sessions around OBIEE, Data Integration, Cloud and Big Data.

NewImage

If you’re at the event and you see any of us in sessions, around the conference or during our talks, we’d be pleased to speak with you about your projects and answer any questions you might have. Here’s the list our speaking slots over the four days of the event, and I’ll update the list with links to presentation downloads as they become available over the event.

In addition, if you’re interested in the OBIEE user adoption and retention area that Robin talks about in his Wednesday session, Rittman Mead have a User Engagement service using some of the tools and techniques that Robin talked about (datasheet here) and we’d be pleased to talk to you about how you can increase user engagement, adoption and retention for your OBIEE system. Other than that, come and speak to us if you see us at the Birmingham ICC, and look forward to more content on these areas in the New Year!

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Managing the OBIEE BI Server Cache from ODI 12c

I wrote recently about the OBIEE BI Server Cache and how useful it can be, but how important it is to manage it properly, both in the purging of stale data and seeding of new. In this article I want to show how to walk-the-walk and not just talk-the-talk (WAT? But you’re a consultant?!). ODI is the premier data integration tool on the market and one that we are great fans of here at Rittman Mead. We see a great many analytics implementations built with ODI for the data load (ELT, strictly speaking, rather than ETL) and then OBIEE for the analytics on top. Managing the BI Server cache from within your ODI batch makes a huge amount of sense. By purging and reseeding the cache directly after the data has been loaded into the database we can achieve optimal cache usage with no risk of stale data.

There are two options for cleanly hooking into OBIEE from ODI 12c with minimal fuss: JDBC, and Web Services. JDBC requires the OBIEE JDBC driver to be present on the ODI Agent machine, whilst Web Services have zero requirement on the ODI side, but a bit of config on the OBIEE side.

Setting up the BI Server JDBC Driver and Topology

Here I’m going to demonstrate using JDBC to connect to OBIEE from ODI. It’s a principle that was originally written up by Julien Testut here. We take the OBIEE JDBC driver bijdbc.jar from $FMW_HOME/Oracle_BI1/bifoundation/jdbc and copy it to our ODI machine. I’m just using a local agent for my testing, so put it in ~/.odi/oracledi/userlib/. For a standalone agent it should go in $AGENT_HOME/odi/agent/lib.

[oracle@ip-10-103-196-207 ~]$ cd /home/oracle/.odi/oracledi/userlib/  
[oracle@ip-10-103-196-207 userlib]$ ls -l  
total 200  
-rw-r----- 1 oracle oinstall    332 Feb 17  2014 additional_path.txt  
-rwxr-xr-x 1 oracle oinstall 199941 Sep 22 14:50 bijdbc.jar

Now fire up ODI Studio, sign in to your repository, and head to the Topology pane. Under Physical Architecture -> Technologies and you’ll see Oracle BI

Right click and select New Data Server. Give it a sensible name and put your standard OBIEE credentials (eg. weblogic) under the Connection section. Click the JDBC tab and click the search icon to the right of the JDBC Driver text box. Select the default, oracle.bi.jdbc.AnaJdbcDriver, and then in the JDBC Url box put your server and port (9703, unless you’ve changed the listen port of OBIEE BI Server)

Now click Test Connection (save the data server when prompted, and click OK at the message about creating a physical schema), and select the Local Agent with which to run it. If you get an error then click Details to find out the problem.

One common problem can be the connection through to the OBIEE server port, so to cut ODI out of the equation try this from the command prompt on your ODI machine (assuming it’s *nix):

nc -vz my-obiee-server.foo.com 9703

If the host resolves correctly and the port is open then you should get:

Connection to my-obiee-server.foo.com 9703 port [tcp/*] succeeded!

If not you’ll get something like:

nc: my-obiee-server.foo.com port 9703 (tcp) failed: Connection refused

Check the usual suspects – firewall (eg iptables) on the OBIEE server, firewalls on the network between the ODI and OBIEE servers, etc.

Assuming you’ve got a working connection you now need to create a Physical Schema. Right click on the new data server and select New Physical Schema.

OBIEE’s BI Server acts as a “database” to clients, within which there are “schemas” (Subject Areas) and “tables” (Presentation Tables). On the New Physical Schema dialog you just need to set Catalog (Catalog), and when you click the drop-down you should see a list of the Subject Areas within your RPD. Pick one – it doesn’t matter which.

Save the physical schema (ignore the context message). At this point your Physical Architecture for Oracle BI should look like this:

Now under Logical Architecture locate the Oracle BI technology, right click on it and select New Logical Schema. From the Physical Schemas dropdown select the one that you’ve just created. Give a name to the Logical Schema.

Your Logical Architecture for Oracle BI should look like this:

Building the Cache Management Routine

Full Cache Purge

Over in the Designer tab go to your ODI project into which you want to integrate the OBIEE cache management functions. Right click on Procedures and select Create New Procedure. Give it a name such as OBIEE Cache – Purge All and set the Target Technology to Oracle BI

Switch to the Tasks tab and add a new Task. Give it a name, and set the Schema to the logical schema that you defined above. Under Target Command enter the call you want to make to the BI Server, which in this case is

call SAPurgeAllCache();

Save the procedure and then from the toolbar menu click on Run. Over in the Operator tab you should see the session appear and soon after complete – all being well – successfully.

You can go and check your BI Server Cache from the OBIEE Administration Tool to confirm that it is now empty:

And confirm it through Usage Tracking:

From what I can see at the default log levels, nothing gets written to either nqquery.log or nqserver.log for this action unless there is an error in your syntax in which case it is logged in nqserver.log:

(For more information on that particular error see here)

Partial Cache Purge

This is the same pattern as above – create an ODI Procedure to call the relevant OBIEE command, which for purging by table is SAPurgeCacheByTable. We’re going to get a step more fancy now, and add a variable that we can pass in so that the Procedure is reusable multiple times over throughout the ODI execution for different tables.

First off create a new ODI Variable that will hold the name of the table to purge. If you’re working with multiple RPD Physical Database/Catalog/Schema objects you’ll want variables for those too:

Now create a Procedure as before, with the same settings as above but a different Target Command, based on SAPurgeCacheByTable and passing in the four parameters as single quoted, comma separated values. Note that these are the Database/Catalog/Schema/Table as defined in the RPD. So “Database” is not your TNS or anything like that, it’s whatever it’s called in the RPD Physical layer. Same for the other three identifiers. If there’s no Catalog (and often there isn’t) just leave it blank.

When including ODI Variable(s) make sure you still single-quote them. The command should look something like this:

Now let’s seed the OBIEE cache with a couple of queries, one of which uses the physical table and one of which doesn’t. When we run our ODI Procedure we should see one cache entry go and the other remain. Here’s the seeded cache:

And now after executing the procedure:

And confirmation through Usage Tracking of the command run:

Cache Seeding

As before, we use an ODI Procedure to call the relevant OBIEE command. To seed the cache we can use SASeedQuery which strictly speaking isn’t documented but a quick perusal of the nqquery.log when you run a cache-seeding OBIEE Agent shows that it is what is called in the background, so we’re going to use it here (and it’s mentioned in support documents on My Oracle Support, so it’s not a state secret). The documentation here gives some useful advice on what you should be seeding the cache with — not necessarily only exact copies of the dashboard queries that you want to get a cache hit for.

Since this is a cookie-cutter of what we just did previously you can use the Duplicate Selection option in ODI Designer to clone one of the other OBIEE Cache procedures that you’ve already created. Amend the Target Command to:

When you run this you should see a positive confirmation in the nqserver.log of the cache seed:

[2015-09-23T23:23:10.000+01:00] [OracleBIServerComponent] [TRACE:3]  
[USER-42] [] [ecid: 005874imI9nFw000jzwkno0007q700008K,0] [tid: 9057d700]  
[requestid: 477a0002] [sessionid: 477a0000] [username: weblogic]  
--------------------  
Query Result Cache: [59124]  
The query for user 'weblogic' was inserted into the query result cache.  
The filename is '/app/oracle/biee/instances/instance1/bifoundation/OracleBIServerComponent/coreapplication_obis1/cache/NQS__735866_84190_2.TBL'. [[

A very valid alternative to calling SASeedQuery would be to call the OBIEE SOA Web Service to trigger an OBIEE Agent that populated the cache (by setting ‘Destination’ to ‘Oracle BI Server Cache (For seeding cache)’). OBIEE Agents can also be ‘daisy chained’ so that one Agent calls another on completion, meaning that ODI could kick off a single ‘master’ OBIEE Agent which then triggered multiple ‘secondary’ OBIEE Agents. The advantage of this approach over SASeedQuery is that cache seeding is more likely to change as OBIEE usage patterns do, and it is easier for OBIEE developers to maintain all the cache seeding code within ‘their’ area (OBIEE Presentation Catalog) than put in a change request to the ODI developers each time to change a procedure.

Integrating it in the ODI batch

You’ve two options here, using Packages or Load Plans. Load Plans were introduced in ODI 11.1.1.5 and are a clearer and more flexible of orchestrating the batch.

To use it in a load plan create a serial step that will call a mapping followed by the procedure to purge the affected table. In the procedure step in the load plan set the value for the variable. At the end of the load plan, call the OBIEE cache seed step:

Alternatively, to integrate the above procedures into a Package instead of a load plan you need to add two steps per mapping. First, the variable is updated to hold the name of the table just loaded, and then the OBIEE cache is purged for the affected table. At the end of the flow a call is made to reseed the cache:

These are some very simple examples, but hopefully illustrate the concept and the powerful nature of integrating OBIEE calls directly from ODI. For more information about OBIEE Cache Management, see my post here.

How Engaged Are Your OBIEE Users?

Following on from Jon’s blog post “User Engagement: Why does it matter?”, I would like to take this one step further by talking about measurement. At Rittman Mead we believe that if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. So how do you measure user engagement?

Metrics

User engagement for OBIEE is like most web based products or services:

  • both have users who access the product or service and then take actions.
  • users of both use it repeatedly if they get value from those actions.

A lot of thought has gone into measuring the customer experience and engagement for web based products and services. Borrowing some of these concepts will help us understand how to measure user engagement for BI solutions.

We look at three metrics:

  • Frequency of use
  • Recency of use
  • Reach of the system

Usage Tracking Data

OBIEE offers visibility of what its users are doing through its Usage Tracking feature, we can use this to drive our metrics.

Figure 1

UT UE LDM

As we can see from Figure 1, the usage tracking data can support our three metrics.

Frequency of use

  • Number of times a user or group of users visit in a specific period (Day / Month / Year)
  • Number of times a dashboard / report is accessed in a specific period.
  • How are these measures changing over time?

Recency of use

  • How recently was a report / dashboard used by relevant user groups?
  • What are the average days between use of each report / dashboard by relevant use group?
  • Number of dashboards / reports used or not used in a specific period (Day / Month / Year)
  • Number of users that have used or not used OBIEE in a specific period (Day / Month / Year)
  • How are these changing over time?

Reach of the system

  • Overall number of users that have used or not used OBIEE. This can be further broken down by user groups.
  • How is it changing over time?

User engagement KPI perspective

We have compared BI solutions to web-based products and services earlier in this post. Let’s look at some popular KPIs that many web-based products use to measure engagement and how they can be used to measure OBIEE engagement.

  • Stickiness: Generally defined as the amount of time spent at a site over a given period.
  • Daily Active Users (DAU): Number of unique users active in a day
  • Monthly Active Users (MAU): Number if unique users active in a month.

DAU and MAU are also used as a ratio (DAU / MAU) to give an approximation of utility.

The R&D division of Rittman Mead has developed the Rittman Mead User Engagement Toolkit, a set of tools and reports to capture and visualise user engagement metrics. The example charts given below have been developed using the R programming language.

Figure 2 – DAU over time with a trailing 30-day average (Red line)

DAU : MAU trailing 30 day average V0.3

Figure 3 – Forecast DAU/MAU for 30 days after the data was generated

Forecast DAU:MAU

What Can You Do With These Insights?

Recall that Jon’s blog post points out the folowing drivers of user engagement:

  • User interface and user experience
  • Quality, relevance, and confidence in data
  • Performance
  • Ability to use the system
  • Accessibility – is the system available in the right way, at the right time?

There are several actions you can take to influence the drivers as a result of monitoring the aforementioned metrics.

  • Identify users or groups that are not using the system as much as they used to. Understand their concerns and address the user engagement drivers that are causing this.
  • Verify usage of any significant enhancement to the BI solution over time.
  • Analyse one of the key drivers, performance, from usage data.
  • Determine peak usage to project future hardware needs.

Conclusion

User engagement is the best way users can get value from their OBIEE systems. Measuring user engagement on an ongoing basis is important and can be monitored with the use of some standard metrics and KPIs.

Future blog posts in this series will address some of the key drivers behind user engagement in addition to providing an overview of the Rittman Mead User Engagement Toolkit.

If you are interested in hearing more about User Engagement please sign up to our mailing list below.