Working with OBIEE in Birmingham, and plans for the BI Apps
April 6th, 2008 by Mark Rittman
I’ve just arrived in Birmingham to be ready for a week of OBIEE data modeling for one of our clients up here. They have built an application that now needs some reports added, they’ve gone for OBIEE and my job is to create the logical model, map it on to their OLTP database, add security and so forth and get it ready for the reports. It’s going to be an interesting task as the data as it stands may or may not be suitable for transforming into a dimensional model, so we may need a bit of OWB to shape and integrate the data before it’s ready for importing. What I’m going to try and do is update the blog over the next few days with the techniques that I use (sort of a “prototype methodology”, something I’ve been planning to do for a while), using some of the sample data on my laptop to illustrate the process I’m using. Let’s see how it goes.
It’s interesting being up here in Birmingham for a reason other than the UKOUG conference - I’ve been up here a few times since last December for various client visits, this time though I’m here for a few days and staying in Jury’s Inn, the hotel we all stayed in for the last conference. Outside it’s snowing though Broad Street looks as busy and manic as usual, I may even pop around to one of the bars around Brindley Place one evening just for a bit of UKOUG meetup nostalgia.
The other thing I’ve been working on is moving all my Oracle BI software on to a new virtual machine based around VMWare, as opposed to Parallels which I’ve been using ever since getting a Mac (VMWare is our company standard). One thing I would also like to get up and running in this new environment is the Oracle BI Apps, which like OBIEE you can download in full from edelivery.oracle.com; I’m keen to see how the BI Apps dimensional model fits together, how the DAC works and how Informatica gets data in to the warehouse, and whilst I could do this using the “BIC2G” demo environment that’s available to partners, installing and configuring it yourself always gives you a bit more insight into how it all works.
One slight issue that I think I’m going to have is that, of course, I’ll need an ERP system to extract data from, Oracle e-Business Suite is the obvious candidate but it’s no small install - last time I looked it was around 33Gb worth of software, which means I’ll probably have to create another VM to put this in and of course go through all the install steps, but at least I should then have the Vision demo instance to use as a data source (these blog postings seem to suggest it’s possible and not too tricky a task, once you’ve managed to download all the disks).
The other thing I considered was one of these “E-Business Suite in a box” setups that gives you 11i on a Mini-ITX server, this would probably be a whole lot easier but I’m not sure if I can justify dropping £600 or so on it. Any other suggestions (such as somewhere I can download a VMWare VM with e-Business Suite already installed) would be gratefully appreciated.
April 7th, 2008 at 9:41 am
You could sign-up for an Amazon EC2 account, build the required VM (XEN based,called AMIs) which could then be stored for future use. Each hour of uptime costs only USD0.10 for smaller instances. I’ve successfully loaded Oracle XE and others have created instances running enterprise database versions so I’m sure it should be possible to load up an Apps instance especially as you’d have access to a fast internet connection to the outside world. Worth checking out.
Tom
April 7th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
You could configure a laptop to run the e-business suite on. (See my ex-colleague’s weblog: http://johanlouwers.blogspot.com)
Else i have an instance i can try to put in an VMWare VM if you like. I have a Centos based install running and i believe i can migrate it into a redhat based vm, just a matter of getting all dependencies right.
April 7th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
I rent a virtual Centos (Red Hat) server from a company for $30/month American. I use it for all my demos. The company I use does month to month agreements. You could rent a virtual server as long as you needed it and then end the service. Just a though.
On the Mac front… there have been whispers about 11g support on the Mac Intel platform. Do you have any insight on that?
Regards,
Stewart
April 7th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Hi Tom, Patrick, Stewart,
Tom - funny enough, the storage itself isn’t the issue, I can get an external, USB-powered hard disk for my Mac that holds 256GB of data for around £100 or so, so this isn’t really the issue, although having it stored “in the cloud” might make it easier to share with colleagues. Thanks for the tip though.
Patrick - thanks for the tip/offer. I see your colleague was lucky enough to get someone to clone an existing instance on to his laptop, I take it this is what you’d do with the VM? Thanks for the offer, if I run out of ideas I might just take you up on this.
Stewart - Ditto around the cloud storage. Could well be an option. Not heard anything on 11g support on the Mac, I’ve seen on mix.oracle.com that’s it’s due shortly (although I think in fact it’s 11g *client* support not database support), though for me they’d need to support OWB, OBIEE etc for it to be viable. Personally I can’t see what the delay is, although I guess it’s more of a hobbyist market (although of course Linux was also this at one stage), and of course OS X is based on BSD not Unix, so I guess the kernel is slightly different?
April 7th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
I’m not currently a Mac user, but I’m about to be. I’ve been mulling this one over for a long time. My understanding is that the newest version of the Mac OS is certified Unix (like Solaris and AIX)… even Linux can’t say that (though there have been a few lawsuits to try and make ‘em).
I would be happy with just the client. I can stand running OWB and OBIEE in a virtual machine… but SQL-Plus is sacred. I want to run that from the Mac OS using the Unix command line.
If you hear anything else, please post about it if you can.
Thanks.