Dylan Wan

Oracle BI Server shipped the Oracle Merant ODBC Driver from DataDirect technology. 

It does a license check so you may receive a warning when you connect to a non-Siebel database.  I received the message when I tried to recalculate the row count in the Oracle BI Server Administration Tool for connecting to a non-Siebel database..

I just installed the Oracle ODBC Instant Client to solve this problem.  It does not require Oracle Home and the installation is very simple.  It took less then 10 minutes for downloading and installing the files. 

I do not have a ORACLE_HOME in my machine since I am using the Oracle XE.  The only problem I have found is that they are running different OC4J servers so I have multiple web server instance on my machines.  Oracle Express takes the port 8080 as the default and the OC4J for analytics is running under the port 9704.

To run the Oracle BI Application, you don't need to install a separate application server.  The OC4J server is packaged with the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition platform and you can put your web pages under X:OracleBIoc4j_bij2eehomedefault-web-app.