Everything Oracle

Overview

Oracle acquired Siebel Analytics as part of its purchase of Siebel Systems in 2005, and promptly rebranded the product as Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE), version 10g. Oracle has made modest changes to this version of OBIEE, and a major upgrade has been anticipated for several years. This upgrade, OBIEE 11g, is now imminent. Based on the information provided by Oracle to date this will be a significant upgrade with plenty of new / reworked functionality to address the deficiencies in 10g and to provide better integration with Oracle’s own product set.

Oracle’s general direction of travel is to provide a single reporting tool interface for users irrespective of the nature of the data source, be it relational or multidimensional. In broader terms, the integration with EPM (aka Hyperion) is continuing, and OBIEE and EPM are scheduled to merge into a single product at the next main release.

However, 11g will probably not include a major re-architecting of the product, and so those developers who were hoping for an API to under-the-hood functionality that would have facilitated the implementation of complex reporting requirements are likely to be disappointed.

In summary, while OBIEE still has some distance to travel before it can be regarded as a mature product, it represents a better buy as an Enterprise reporting tool stack than those offered by its competitions.

Migration

The good news is that the migration from 10g to 11g should be automatic with no need for recoding, except possibly in the case of some chart-based functionality (the chart implementation has been reworked and brought in-house, see below).

A migration assistant for Discoverer metadata has been available for some time, but an assistant for Discover workbook migration has been on and off – the latest information is that it will not be provided.

A migration tool for Oracle Reports is on the cards.

An easy migration from Business Objects is important for Oracle in bringing in extra revenue, and this migration should be much easier in 11g – Oracle has an in-house tool for Business Objects migration and this tool may be bundled in with OBIEE 11g.

OBE Training

The online OBE training courses for 10g will be updated to showcase the new 11g functionality.

New Platforms

OBIEE 11g will be available on the iPhone as a downloadable application.

Data Sources

Application Development Framework

OBIEE 11g will support Oracle’s Application Development Framework (ADF) as a data source. This is an important development as ADF is a key component in Oracle’s future strategy.

Coherence

Oracle acquired Coherence with its purchase of Tangosol in 2007. Coherence is an in-memory grid aimed at servicing high performance compute-intensive, real-time transactions, and represents a key enterprise technology. The grid is populated from relational sources using ORM software to create Java Objects. The availability of real-time reporting against the grid or against aggregated structures built on top of the grid in therefore an important consideration. At present there are no ODBC or JBDC drivers in the pipeline for grid access, but a query interface based around SQL will be available. While not presently supported it is possible to access the Coherence grid from ADF.

Essbase

It’s uncertain whether the current considerable limitations on using Essbase as a datasource will be removed, or whether explicit MDX coding will still be required to support moderate to complex reports.

Multidimensional

Some very good news on the multidimensional front: in 11g the BI Server will be able to autogenerate Essbase and OLAP cubes. This functionality represents a very healthy development as far as improved performance is concerned. A relational 3NF format remains the best logical representation for business data. But if data subsets can be automatically “cubed” to improve performance, as required, then this represents the best of both worlds.

Installation

Oracle will now officially support multiple instances of OBIEE on the same machine. Using multiple instances represents a higher risk solution that using virtual machines but it’s still useful to have it available as an option.

Metadata

A major defect in 10g has been remedied: 11g will support dynamic dimensional levels so that ragged, parent-child, and unbalanced hierarchies will be supported.

The undocumented, but widely used facility, to convert the binary RPD to a UDML text file format will be supported, but with the file format upgraded to XML (UDXML) to ease parsing and manipulation.

KPIs are now supported as a metadata objects.

Answers & Dashboards

Interface

The interface will reflect Oracle’s objective of providing a report definition and ad hoc reporting tool that is agnostic with regard to the source of data. A sleeker, more fully functioned interface that incorporates sliders and master-detail reports is promised, its more OLAP-like look and feel reflecting Oracle’s purchase of Essbase.

Filters

Filters can now be defined independently of reports.

Colour Coded-Pivot Tables

Colour coded pivot tables are one of the mainstays of financial reporting. Unfortunately, in 10g only very simple cell conditions can be colour-coded using the GUI and post-processing of the web page is required to achieve a useful range of functionality – an issue that runs all the way back to Siebel. In 11g these limitations will be removed.

Navigation

In 11g it’s possible to navigate to a web service as well as a web page.

Calculation Items

Calculation items can be saved to the web catalog. As with filters, this change represents a promising trend towards a more modular and template-based style of report development, one in which a report can be constructed from predefined and reusable components.

Scorecard

This has been in and out for sometime, but it’s most likely to be made available as a separately licensed optional extra.

Graphics

The PopChart / OptiMap charting software from Corda Technologies is replaced by a native Oracle implementation.

BI Publisher

A new, web-based interface to BI Publisher will be available as an alternative to stuffing XSL code into the “tag jungle” under “Alternative text” within MS-Word – a very welcome development as this goes some way to integrating Publisher into Answers & Dashboards (given the high degree of overlap in functionality, there is no justification for maintaining two separate products).

What’s Missing

The same old painfully inadequate release processing procedures are likely to be present.

The “Evaluate” security loophole is unlikely to be closed.

A good API for reports and metadata development that allows complex reports to be created by bypassing the GUI is unlikely to make an appearance. The main weakness of OBIEE is the rather “organic” and at times counterintuitive structure of the GUI and the fact that the GUI has its limitations. What’s needed is a modular code-oriented layer underneath the GUI, one that can be manipulated by an API, and one that unifies the mare’s nest of CSS, XML, and Javascript files around which OBIEE has been built.

Everything Oracle

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OBIEE	11g	Preview

Features and Functionality – Coming Soon