Rittman Mead Blog - OBIEE - Oracle BI Enterprise Edition

Web-Based RPD Upload and Download for OBIEE 12c

I was among the people who were dancing and singing after finding out some of the OBIEE 12c new features. The feature I liked the most was a scripted deploy of an RPD file from a developer’s computer. I hate to make dozens of clicks for every deploy of

obiee

ETL Offload with Spark and Amazon EMR - Part 1 - Introduction

We recently undertook a two-week Proof of Concept exercise for a client, evaluating whether their existing ETL processing could be done faster and more cheaply using Spark. They were also interested in whether something like Redshift [http://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/mgmt/welcome.html] would provide a suitable

sdlc

Source Control and Automated Code Deployment Options for OBIEE

It's Monday morning. I've arrived at a customer site to help them - ironically enough - with automating their OBIEE code management. But, on arrival, I'm told that the OBIEE team can't meet with me because someone did a release on the

obiee

The Visual Plugin Pack for OBIEE

Last week we announced the Rittman Mead Open Source project [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2016/12/the-rittman-mead-open-source-project/], and released into open source: * the excellent Insights [https://www.rittmanmead.com/blog/2016/12/insights-an-open-source-visualisation-platform-for-obiee/] project, a javascript API/framework for building a new frontend for OBIEE, written by Minesh Patel

enhanced usage tracking

Enhanced Usage Tracking for OBIEE - Now Available as Open Source!

Introduction OBIEE provides Usage Tracking [https://docs.oracle.com/middleware/12212/biee/BIESG/GUID-9F8FCB4B-EA17-4302-813A-BEF84F295A6A.htm#BIESG211] as part of the core product functionality. It writes directly to a database table every Logical Query that hits the BI Server, including details of who ran it, when, and information about how it

open source

Insights - An Open-Source Visualisation Platform for OBIEE

On and off over the last year, I have spent some time developing a customisable framework for building visualisations and dashboards, using OBIEE as the back-end. The result is Insights, a JavaScript web application that offers a modern alternative to OBIEE Answers. As of today, we have officially open sourced

OBIEE12c

Introducing On Demand Training from Rittman Mead

Rittman Mead is happy to announce that its much anticipated On Demand Training [https://www.rittmanmead.com/on-demand-training/] (ODT) service is live, giving people the opportunity to receive expertly written & delivered self-paced training courses that can be accessed online anywhere, at anytime. We have been delivering technical & end-user

obiee

Catalog Validation: Why, What, When, Where and How?

One of the features everybody "loved" about OBIEE 11g were the Global Unique Identifiers [http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/bi.1111/e10543/privileges.htm#BIESC721] (GUIDs), used to recognize users and groups based on an identifier that could be different from the username. The original aim

obiee

Common OBIEE Implementation Mistakes That Impact Performance

I've recently performed several assessments to help our clients diagnose and fix their OBIEE performance problems. They often share similar design or implementation issues, and I thought it would be useful to present them here as a handy reference: * No software monitoring * Randomly changing configuration settings * Data transformation

OBIEE12c

Performing a 12c Upgrade with a New Install

Software updates often include new features, and while useful, these new features are often the only driving factors in upgrading software. There's no harm in wanting to play around with the shiny new toy but many software updates also include much more significant changes, such as resolving bugs

odi

OBIEE, Big Data Discovery, and ODI security updates - October 2016

Oracle release their "Critical Patch Update" (CPU) notices every quarter, bundling together details of vulnerabilities and associated patches across their entire product line. October's was released yesterday [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/security-advisory/cpuoct2016-2881722.html], with a few entries of note in the analytics & DI

obiee

OTN Appreciation Day : OBIEE's BI Server

Oracle Technology Network [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/index.html] (OTN) is one you'll be familiar with if you do anything with Oracle software, from downloading the installers [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/indexes/downloads/index.html], reading the documentation [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/indexes/documentation/index.

obiee

OTN Appreciation Day: OBIEE's Export to Excel Functionality

Only kidding…. Do you know that almost any transformation doable in excel can be achieved in OBIEE, probably faster and with zero impact on your local workstation? Image credit https://twitter.com/fomin_andrew/status/749305992198881281Why bothering downloading data to Excel when you have pivot tables, conditional formatting and a

Conferences

POUG

I've just attended my first user group in Poland, the very-excellent POUG [http://poug.org/en/]. This was the first international version of the conference, having been run previously just within Poland. Based on these two days, I would say it was a resounding success! There was a

obiee

All You Ever Wanted to Know About OBIEE Performance…but were too afraid to ask

At the Polish Oracle Users Group (POUG) conference [http://poug.org/en/timeline/] this week I'm presenting one of my favourite talks, [Still] No Silver Bullets - OBIEE Performance in the Real World [https://speakerdeck.com/rmoff/still-no-silver-bullets-obiee-12c-performance-in-the-real-world] . This presentation is based on the shared experiences of myself

odbc

How To Poke Around OBIEE on Linux with strace (Working with Unsupported ODBC Sources in OBIEE 12c)

OBIEE 12c (and 11g and 10g before it) supports three primary ways [https://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1221/biee/BIEMG/deploy_rpd.htm#BIEMG1465] of connecting to data sources: 1. Native Gateway [https://docs.oracle.com/middleware/1221/biee/BIEMG/deploy_rpd.htm#BIEMG1179] , such as OCI for Oracle. This

apache drill

Using Apache Drill with OBIEE 12c

Apache Drill [https://drill.apache.org/] enables querying with SQL against a multitude of datasources [https://drill.apache.org/docs/connect-a-data-source/] including things like JSON files, Parquet and Avro, Hive tables, RDBMS and more. MapR have released an ODBC driver [https://drill.apache.org/docs/installing-the-driver-on-linux/#step-1:-download-the-mapr-drill-odbc-driver] for it,

Technical

OBIEE 12.2.1.1.0 - New Feature Guide

Oracle has recently released version 12.2.1.1.0 [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bi-enterprise-edition/downloads/business-intelligence-3046226.html] for OBIEE 12c, which has a variety of exciting new features for Data Visualization, BI Publisher, Dashboards in OBIEE, and ODBC connections. It can be performed as an in-place upgrade

obiee

Announcing OBI Remote Training

Since the release of OBIEE 12c in 2015, we have received countless inquiries about how we would be offering our training. Our customers are familiar with our ability to provide on-site private training for a team and we are well known for hosting training classes in our offices in the

Technical

Connecting Oracle Data Visualization Desktop to OBIEE

Recently at Rittman Mead we have been asked a lot of questions surrounding Oracle’s new Data Visualization Desktop tool and how it integrates with OBIEE. Rather than referring people to the Oracle docs on DVD, I decided to share with you my experience connecting to an OBIEE 12c instance

Technical

OBIEE 12c – Extended Subject Areas (XSA) and the Data Set Service

One of the big changes in OBIEE 12c for end users is the ability to upload their own data sets and start analysing them directly, without needing to go through the traditional data provisioning and modelling process and associated leadtimes. The implementation of this is one of the big architectural

Technical

Changes in BI Server Cache Behaviour in OBIEE 12c : OBIS_REFRESH_CACHE

The OBIEE BI Server cache can be a great way of providing a performance boost to response times for end users - so long as it's implemented carefully. Done wrong, and you're papering over the cracks and heading for doom; done right, and it's

Technical

Under the Covers of OBIEE 12c Configuration with sysdig

OBIEE 12c has changed quite a lot in how it manages configuration. In OBIEE 11g configuration was based around system MBeans [https://docs.oracle.com/middleware/11119/biee/BIESG/configsettings.htm#BIESG1643] and the biee-domain.xml as the master copy of settings - and if you updated a configuration directly

Technical

ChitChat: The Importance of BI Integrations

A user's workflow shouldn't change to accommodate a new tool. A new tool should fill a gap in the current workflow and help streamline the user's process. An application without a clearly defined scope eventually overlaps with existing solutions, creating confusion and distress among

Technical

New OTN Article - OBIEE Performance Analytics: Analysing the Impact of Suboptimal Design

I’m pleased to have recently had my first article published on the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) [http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/index.html]. You can read it in its full splendour and glory(!) over there [https://community.oracle.com/docs/DOC-993649], but I thought I’d give a bit