OBIEE 10.1.3.3.1 Now Available On OTN

Venkat and Abhinav posted the news earlier today; Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.3.1 is now on general release on OTN, I've downloaded it and it's a straightforward upgrade that can be applied on top of 10.1.3.3 (not sure about earlier releases). Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to come with the Essbase integration that was mentioned in the various Oracle BI roadmap presentations, hopefully this won't be too long coming as it'll be interesting to see what new possibilities there are plugging an XML/A-compliant OLAP server into the Oracle BI Suite EE foundation layer.

What this release does come with though, is a couple of neat new features. Firstly, when going for the advanced install option that installs OBIEE into Oracle Application Server, as opposed to a standalone OC4J container, all of the various J2EE apps (the Analytics app, the BI Office app, BI Publisher and so on) get installed into a single OC4J container rather than a separate one for each product. This saves a fair bit of memory as a single OC4J container takes up less memory than several running alongside each other.

The other neat new feature is a Web Services interface over BI Publisher. I've got an article appearing on OTN in the near future on using the Web Services interface over the OBIEE Presentation Server; it'll be interesting to see what we can do with a similar interface over the OBIEE publishing tool.