OBIEE Ramblings

Another question that pops up frequently is around certification. When it comes to OBIEE, the bible is the SRSP (System Requirements and Supported Platforms). This is available in the OBIEE product documentation. BTW, a quick link to most Oracle product documentation is http://docs.oracle.com.

Simarly for BI Apps, the SRSP is available in the BI Apps product documentation.

The SRSP contains items such as:

• Harware Requirements
• Supported Operating Systems
• Supported Appliaction Servers
• Supported Identity Management Solutions
• Supported Data Sources
• Supported Web Browsers
• Supported Languages

The current SRSP documents are:

• OBIEE 10.1.3.4.1
• BI Apps 7.9.6

While the links above cover a couple of the older releases, I was asked recently for the SRSP for some really old versions of Siebel Analytics. After some digging, I found the following on the new Oracle Support (previously Metalink3) website:

Oracle Business Intelligence Certification Matrix [ID 745042.1]

When it comes to the Plus part of OBIEE+ (IR, FR, PR and WA), these product certifications are still listed in the Oracle Enterprise Performance Management documentation. Specifically, the certification matrices for the various products are available here.

Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System, Fusion Edition Release 11.1.1.3 products are now Generally Available:

• This maintenance release builds on the previously released Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System, Fusion Edition Release 11.1.1.2
• New Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Integrator module for Financial Data Quality Management provides turnkey integration with Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft General Ledgers
• This release is a localised release and available globally

WHAT'S NEW

• Oracle® Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management, Fusion Edition - ERP Integrator is a new module of FDM that simplifies ERP integration with EPM applications. Metadata and data can be loaded to HFM or Planning from supported sources including Oracle E-Business Suite General Ledger 11.5.10 cu2, 12.0.6, 12.1.1 and PeopleSoft General Ledger 9.0. Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Financial Management, Smart View or Financial Reports users can also drill through to the EBS or PeopleSoft general ledgers to further analyze the data and examine transactional details
• Oracle® Hyperion Smart View for Office, Fusion Edition supports the ability to import Metadata allowing you to maintain the metadata of a worksheet previously lost during a copy and paste worksheet operation
• Oracle® Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management Architect, Fusion Edition - Calculation Manager now supports Essbase, classic Planning and Financial Management applications for graphical design, validation and administration of business rules
• Oracle® Hyperion Financial Management, Fusion Edition -Automated Consolidation Journals displays the data updates made as part of the consolidation process as journal entries for reporting purposes
• Oracle® Essbase provides enhanced integration with Crystal Ball to support inline simulations within the Smart View Excel interface. Users can specify assumption variables and forecast variables directly within Excel. When a simulation is run, Crystal Ball will reference and use the calculations to recalculate the simulation model and arrive at forecast distributions for the designated forecast variables
• Oracle® Hyperion Visual Explorer introduces prebuilt geographic mappings for the United States and Canada, and automatically associates a geographical dimension for visual analysis against a map
• Numerous other enhancements and defect fixes (for details, please see the Readme for each EPM System product or component)

THE BOTTOM LINE

• Oracle ERP Integrator significantly eases the integration between Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft Enterprise General Ledgers and Hyperion Applications
• Oracle ERP Integrator will deliver improved ROI for both EPM and ERP Investments
• Every Oracle EBS and PeopleSoft customer should improve their Performance Management capabilities by integrating with Hyperion Financial Management and Hyperion Planning
• The Oracle EPM System helps organizations achieve management excellence by unifying category-leading Hyperion applications, prebuilt BI Applications and BI products, into a complete integrated system for managing and optimizing performance across business functions

A question that normally pops up in every RFx we have to respond to is what is the release history of our product. I have typically found this information hard to come by, but have been able to compile the following list (with a lot of input from Esmond Chia):

These products have a long heritage with Oracle BIEE being based on Siebel Business Analytics which was originally created by nQuire in 1997 and Hyperion Essbase was originally created by Arbor prior to being acquired by Hyperion in 1998. The following major releases of the software have occurred:

Recent Oracle BIEE release history is as follows:

• Siebel Analytics 7.0 - 2002
• Siebel Analytics 7.5 - 2003
• Siebel Analytics 7.7 - 2004
• Siebel Analytics 7.8.2 and 7.8.3 - 2005
• Siebel Analytics / Oracle Business Intelligence 7.8.4 and 7.8.5 - 2006
• OBIEE 10gR3, 10.1.3.2 - Jan 2007
• OBIEE 10gR3, 10.1.3.2.1 - Apr 2007
• OBIEE 10gR3, 10.1.3.3.0 - Aug 2007
• OBIEE 10gR3, 10.1.3.3.1 - Oct 2007
• OBIEE 10gR3, 10.1.3.3.2 - Dec 2007
• OBIEE 10gR3, 10.1.3.3.3 - May 2007
• OBIEE 10gR3, 10.1.3.4 - Aug 2008
• OBIEE 10gR3, 10.1.3.4.1 - Apr 2009

Recent Hyperion Essbase release history is as follows:

• Version 9.0 - Sep 2005
• Version 9.0.1 - Dec 2005
• Version 9.2 - Jun 2006
• Version 9.3 - Jan 2007
• Version 9.3.1 - Nov 2007
• Version 11.1.1.1 - Sep 2008
• Version 11.1.1.2 - Mar 2009
• Version 11.1.1.3 - Aug 2009 (Essbase Crystal Ball integration, Smartview Metadata, HVE Maps)

Recent Oracle BI Apps release history is as follows:

• Business Analytics Applications 7.0.x - Dec 2001
• Business Analytics Applications 7.5.x - Aug 2002
• Business Analytics Applications 7.7.x - Jun 2004
• Business Analytics Applications 7.8.x - Nov 2005
• BI Apps 7.9.0 - Jan 2007
• BI Apps 7.9.1 - Apr 2007 (added Siebel 8.0 certification)
• BI Apps 7.9.2 - May 2007 (added Profitability Analytics for OFSA 4.5)
• BI Apps 7.9.3 - Aug 2007 (certify for PeopleSoft Financials 8.4 / 8.8 and HR 8.8)
• BI Apps 7.9.4 - Dec 2007 (certify EBS R12)
• BI Apps 7.9.5 - May 2008 (certify Informatica PowerCenter 8.1.1 SP4 and PeopleSoft Financials 8.9 / 9.0 and HR 8.9 / 9.0)
• BI Apps 7.9.6 - Apr 2009 (added Project Analytics, Loyalty Analytics, JDE Fin Analytics)

The latest shipping versions are:

• OBIEE: 10.1.3.4.1
• Essbase: 11.1.1.3
• BI Apps: 7.9.6

See Oracle has just announced the purchase of GoldenGate. They have been a long time partner with OWB.

Looking at their website they provide the following solutions:

HIGH AVAILABILITY AND DISASTER TOLERANCE
• Active-Active
• Zero-Downtime Migrations
• Zero-Downtime Upgrades
• Zero-Downtime Maintenance
• Live Standby

REAL-TIME DATA INTEGRATION
• Real-Time Data Warehousing
• Live Reporting
• Real-Time CDC for ETL
• Transactional Data Integration

More info available here.

A simple one today, but a question I get asked regularly is the difference between OBIEE+ and OBISE1. OBISE1 is a cut down version of OBIEE+ designed to cater for entry level deals however both are based on the same technology platform. The differences between the 2 are:

OBIEE+

• Can be licenced either by Named User or Processor
• Min 50 users, or 1 CPU
• Has the modules (see here for more detail):
• BI Server - Common enterprise business model and abstraction layer
• BI Answers – Ad-Hoc Analysis and Reporting
• BI Interactive Dashboards - Proactive business activity monitoring and alerting
• BI Briefing Books - Snapshots of dashboard pages to view and share in offline mode
• BI Publisher – Enterprise reporting and distribution of "pixel-perfect" reports
• BI Delivers – Proactive business activity monitoring and alerting
• BI Office – MS Office plugins
• Disconnected Analytics - Full analytical functionality for the mobile professionals
• Note this is an extra cost option to OBIEE+
• Licence also contains the old Hyperion Reporting Tools
• Interactive Reports
• Production Reports
• Web Analysis
• Financial Reports

OBISE1

• Can only be licenced by Named User
• Min 5, Max 50 Users
• Licence also includes a Oracle Database SE1 licence for the same # of Named Users
• Product is restricted to be used against the included Database and 1 other relational data source
• but unlimited flat file sources
• Does not contain BI Office, BI Delivers, or the Hyperion Reporting Tools. Thus only has:
• BI Server - Common enterprise business model and abstraction layer
• BI Answers – Ad-Hoc Analysis and Reporting
• BI Interactive Dashboards - Proactive business activity monitoring and alerting
• BI Briefing Books - Snapshots of dashboard pages to view and share in offline mode
• BI Publisher – Enterprise reporting and distribution of "pixel-perfect" reports

Customers can start with OBISE1 and the later migrate to OBIEE+ if they require additional users or functionality. BTW, one question I often get is can OBISE1 integrate with MS Office. You can download content from Answers/Dashboards into Office (Excel/Powerpoint) but it is a static copy of the data, unlike OBIEE which also has the BI Office plugin’s for MS Office which allow you to refresh and secure the reports directly from Excel/Powerpoint.

Recently during a customer POC we were required to call OBIEE Dashboards from a Portal (happened to be Lifray), passing prompts.

Historically you had to build up the URL yourself to include the relevant parameters in the URL - a painful and error-prone process. Venkat provided an excellent blog entry on URL parameters (have a look at the list he maintains on spreadsheets.google.com).

To simplify life, an interesting feature was introduced in 10.1.3.3 which makes the creation of the URL to provide the prompt parameters a lot easier.

To enable this functionality you need to add the following to your instance config.xml (and bounce the Presentation Server process):

To quote the documentation:

"This Prompted Link is intended to support both manual and programmatic manipulation of that link and also aims to provide a simple URL-based API for generating and customizing Dashboard content. Unlike the Bookmark Link, this link is dynamic, which maps to no saved catalog content.

When configured to show this feature, the Dashboard Page Options menu will show a "Create Prompted Link" option. Selecting this option will generate the Prompted Link and the user will see a message indicating, "A Prompted link capturing the prompts and values of this page has been created."

This is the Prompted Link syntax:

, Action=Navigate, Column1 (col1), Operator1 (op1), Values1(val1), Column2 (col2), Operator2 (op2), Values2 (val2) ...

Values are separated by pluses and to further simplify this syntax the operator parameter is not needed for equal (eq). Double quotes are also optional if there are no white spaces inside the values.

These are Prompted Link examples:

...Action=Navigate&col1=Products.Color&val1=Armory
...Action=Navigate&col1=Products.Color&val1=Armory+Clear
...Action=Navigate&col1=Products.Color&op1=bet&val1=Armory+Clear
...Action=Navigate&col1=Products.Color&val1="Armory"+"Clear"&col2=Periods."Month"&val2="04/01/1998%2012:00:00%20AM"
...Action=Navigate&col1=Products.Color&val1="Armory"+"Clear"&col2=Periods."Month"&op2=gt&val2="05/01/1998%2012:00:00%20AM""

Note that 2 features are actually enabled by the change to instanceconfig.xml above. The second is the ability to create a Bookmark Link that provides a mechanism whereby a user may obtain a shortcut link to a Dashboard page, which contains all aspects of page state. This link can then be e-mailed to another user who (assuming they had identical permissions and access) can enter that link into the URL line of a browser and view the same page content. The recipient could then further analyze the data in the Dashboard. Technically, page state is too complex to capture in a URL so this functionality writes an object to the Presentation Services catalog, which is called by the Bookmark Link URL.

Basically, the one provides a static link to the content as at creation time (with a link that is aged out based on the days set in the instanceconfig.xml) , and the other provides a dynamic link to the content based o the parameters passed in the URL.

One of my colleagues in Oracle Consulting (Gavin Steenkamp) pointed out a cool feature around monitoring performance in OBIEE today.

If you go to the the following URL on your OBIEE installation:

http://myserver/analytics/saw.dll?perfmon (log in as Administrator)

This is what you will see:

There is also of course the BI Management Pack, and Usage Tracking functionality.

A question that has popped up occasionally is if we support the ability to plot a Trend Line on a chart (ala MS Excel). There is an example of this in the sample content that we now ship with OBIEE (BTW, the latest sample content can be downloaded here):

This example uses a linear regression curve. Note that this is not an OOTB (out of the box) function in OBIEE, but the calculation can be built (either directly in the Answers request, or in the RPD Metadata so that a user can then just drag the field onto a report).

The example in the sample content above actually has the calculation in the Answers request formula (which makes it look a lot more complicated than it actually is).

Continue reading "A small diGRESSION" »

Well after years of sponging off others blog entries, I've decided to enter the fray and post some of my own ramblings that will hopefully be of assistance to those in the Oracle BI/EPM and DW world.

My name is Darryn Hinett and I'm currently a Pre-Sales consultant in the Oracle Business Intelligence team based out of Sydney, Australia. I plan to post the things I learn about the products as I interact with them, work on POC's and answer customer questions.

Please feel free to add any comments.

Darryn