An OBI 11g Client Tools Only Install Work-Around

OBI 11g has been out for several months now and it is getting great reviews - As it should! It is a clean and powerful upgrade from its 10g predecessor. With that being said, many things have changed, not only from a graphical end-user perspective but from a foundation and architecture one as well. This post is specifically discussing the later. Even more specifically, this post touches on what is probably the loudest complaint of System Integrators thus far which is that OBI 11g does not have a client tools install like OBI 10g did. What does this mean OBI 11g integrators and developers? It means that basically anytime one needs to leverage the Administration Tool, Catalog Manager, etc. on a client workstation (away from the OBI Server, i.e.: client/server interaction) the workstation must be loaded with all binaries and configurations as if it was to be the OBI 11g server itself. Oracle's documentation goes on to say that after a full install (Simple or Enterprise) on a client workstation (Windows only, of course) that one must shutdown and disable all server related Windows Services. Clearly this is cumbersome to say the least just to get client tools loaded.

To workaround this one can conduct the OBI 11g installation on a certified client OS using the Software Only Install option. This option requires that a Fusion Middleware Home already be established. So, WebLogic 10.3.3 must be installed on the client machine prior to conducting the OBI 11g Software Only installation. You may download from here or from the Oracle e-delivery site.

If you attempt to conduct the software only install without prior installation of the WebLogic Server you will be confronted with the following error messages (INST-07407, INST-07247):

Once the WebLogic Server has been installed on the client OS, install OBI 11g using the Software Only option. The installation should complete without incident as only the binaries are installed on the client machine. Once the install completes, navigate to the administration tool executable now under the path <fmw_home>\Oracle_BI1\bifoundation\server\bin\admintool.exe.

Please note that the administration tool and all OBIEE 11g client tools are certified to run on a 32-bit OS only. Be warned that the client tools will install onto a 64-bit machine but Oracle currently will not support that version OS if something goes wrong. Please see this link for the current OBI 11g certification matrix, here (OBI 11g Release 1) or here for the full Full Fusion Middleware Certification Matrices. Take note that this is an OBI 11g Client Tools Only Install Work-Around and it is not-officially supported by Oracle But, it is much more efficient than the extra steps per the Oracle documentation.

References
https://support.oracle.com/CSP/main/article?cmd=show&type=NOT&id=1186342.1

Which Tool Should Be Used for Reporting?

My clients often wonder which Oracle tool they should use for reporting, building graphs, and generating dashboards. It’s a great question because, as anyone in this realm knows, there are many different options. This blog will touch on the three reporting tools I’m familiar with: Financial Reporting Studio (FRS), Web Analysis (WA), and Oracle Business Intelligence Answers (OBI).

One caveat here is that the bulk of my experience comes from the Oracle Hyperion side, so I have much more familiarity with FRS and WA, and definitely less so with OBI. So, this blog will be written from that perspective.

Below, I’ll give a synopsis of what each tool does, based on my experience, followed by my opinion of when each should be used.

Financial Reporting Studio
FRS is a great tool for producing regular reports, like a monthly reporting package. It allows you to create production level reports with a multitude of formatting options. FRS reports can be viewed in PDF or HTML format, from a client component or over the web. Reports can be gathered together in Books and batch scheduled to run at the frequency of your choosing, and then saved to a particular location or emailed out to a list of users.

FRS is not a tool for producing dashboards, is limited in its chart and graph functionality, and would not generally be used for ad-hoc reporting.

Web Analysis
WA comes from the Hyperion suite of products as the tool for building dashboards. In my experience, it’s most often used to create quick snapshots of data for management or executive level users. WA allows you to create multi-view looks at your critical business metrics, either in graphical or grid format. For example, a dashboard might include a line graph of sales by region in one quadrant, a bar chart of sales by VP in another quadrant, a pie chart of expenses by category, and a grid showing spending by department. WA includes traffic lighting as a feature, allowing you to highlight or color significant variances of data.

WA would not be used for production reporting.

Oracle BI Answers
OBI Answers is a tool for building both reports and dashboards from a variety of sources including relational and multi-dimensional databases. You can build similar dashboards to what WA offers and publish reports similar to what FRS offers. The entire OBI suite has pre-built modules by industry that allow for easier implementation depending on the particular business case.

While OBI Answers can use Oracle Essbase as a data source, there are some issues in doing so that prohibit the use when a particular hierarchy exists. This should be addressed in an upcoming release, but at this point, the OBI link to the Oracle Hyperion suite of products is very limited.

Which Tool?
So, which reporting tool should be used when? With the current releases and functionality available, here is how I would use them:

FRS – Use for regular production reporting such as income statements, operating expenses, headcount, and any other meaningful financial metrics from an Oracle Hyperion data source such as Essbase, Planning, or Financial Management. I generally don’t create charts and graphs using FRS because the options and functionality are fairly limited. But, if you have fairly straightforward and simple chart requirements, then FRS should work fine for you.

WA – I would use Web Analysis for producing grid and chart dashboards from an Oracle Hyperion data source. WA does a good job of incorporating “bells and whistles” that make a dashboard “pop”, providing important metrics quickly.

OBI Answers – OBI is a great tool to use to quickly build reports and dashboards from a data warehouse. In my opinion, this is the easiest tool to learn and use of the three. As I mentioned above, I don’t think it’s currently the right tool to use with Oracle Hyperion data sources, but that very well could change in the near future.

Going Forward
In future releases, I think that OBI will become the tool of choice for reporting and dashboarding, even for Oracle Hyperion data sources. Oracle is very good at creating synergies between their product lines, and while each individual application generally has their own set of tools, eventually, they converge to similar toolset technologies. I think as OBI gets more integrated with the Oracle Hyperion suite of products, it will become the tool of choice for reporting. In my opinion, it is easier to both learn and use compared to both Financial Reporting Studio and Web Analysis.

Real World Analogies in OBIEE

As OBIEE emerges as a cornerstone part of Oracle’s Web 2.0 Fusion offering, it is a good time to discuss a real world analogy that has been apparent to me for many years now and has generated excitement during planning sessions of the more innovative implementation teams I’ve been on. OBIEE is an excellent web tool, for its dashboards and navigations, and it is important to look at User Groups as a cohort of individuals with shared goals who need to use OBIEE as a communications tool and as an effective analytic tool. A tool that has been useful in the real world for doing this is the fantasy sports league application, and it gives us many valuable insights for achieving uptake in our OBIEE implementations.

Although it is ironic that an application with the word “fantasy” in its title would be a useful analogy to solve our business problems, it is still true. Fantasy sports leagues have been very successful in the real world as an analytic tool that has had mass uptake. The application needs to be effective in helping groups to complete their assigned work, and to make better decisions, which are both key goals of our OBIEE implementations. Fantasy leagues are used as a communication vehicle for real world business groups that are looking for ways to interact, such as a college cohort looking to stay in touch after graduation, or a company contest. The value of contests as a business tool for generating ideas is well documented. Google’s programming contest, which started in 2002 has generated tens of thousands of applications, is responsible for important real-world systems like Google Local and Professor-Verifier [The Google Way, Chapter 7: Look for Ideas Where They Are, Bernard Girard, No Starch Press 2009].

The history of the fantasy leagues, more than thirty million strong today, is curiously analogous to what we want to achieve with OBIEE. From 1960 to 1980 it was a tool used by the intellectual elite, like Harvard Sociology Professor William Gamson’s “Baseball Seminar”. Rotisserie leagues started getting media attention in 1980, and special notice was given to the fact that data was used in real time, statistics from the current season. The business of statistical analysis matured in the fantasy sports field after its popularity created a demand for optimized predictions of specified Key Performance Indicators that scored points in the leagues.

Fantasy sports as a web application online is currently used by over 30 million people, creating competition for the best analytic dashboards to attract the most users.

So what do analytic dashboards used by these fantasy leagues look like, and how can we do that in OBIEE dashboards? While graphs may be important, note that for the masses these graphs are not extremely useful. Tabular lists dominate fantasy sport websites. The lists must default to the most useful Top-N and be re-sort-able by column. This is a common feature of tabular reporting in OBIEE, but it is important to understand that in the real world, other more graphic features do not undermine the importance of putting our data in this fashion on dashboards. The ability to quickly navigate from one presentation of data to another presentation of data with the same visual representation, a tabular, re-sortable presentation, is the dominant feature. Visual keys, surprisingly, are most useful when they simply give us more information on that representation. For example, ESPN has a Top-N page of multiple major categories, and the graphic is simply a photograph of the face of the top person in that category. In OBIEE, it might be useful to expose more photos of our business individuals, such as the business owner responsible for the dashboard. If it were a KPI were measured by team performance, a team logo might be useful. More sophisticated analytic tools are for a different audience, and follow the needs of the statistical analysts who are part of smaller decision teams, so they do not get exposed on the dashboards used by most of the people who consume the application. This might be an equivalent of a text alert on the screen that aggregates the number of Monte-Carlo simulations that were done, but exposing details of the thousands of simulations would not be possible.

BI Applications in 7.9.6 already have done some good work in providing a user experience. We just have to pay careful attention about how to implement the system. For example, built into the out-of-the-box experience are two sets of dashboards. The set of dashboards that is used by most people has the common presentations similar to fantasy leagues, such as the Top-N type of presentation. When you see demos of the tool, they default to the graphics, but there is a view selector that allows tabular lists of the data, and I would suggest considering in most cases whether the default presentation when coming on-screen should be tabular to reduce clicks and increase usability. The other set of dashboards spans multiple subject areas. These are pre-built statistical analyses available for when decisions need to be made upon the data, and include scatter charts, regressions and tools common to a smaller audience, the more sophisticated decision analysts.

Another question I have been asked in OBIEE implementation discussions is whether a contest for who uses the dashboards the most is possible. This would be analogous to the fantasy sports league itself. The answer is that it is very possible, in fact we do monitor usage in the OBIEE implementations, and more sophisticated applications are already developed. BIConsultingGroup’s product IMPACT gets more sophisticated reporting out of the usage of the end users. A dashboard could be designed and written with the specific intent of making a usage contest out of the usage analysis information, with the key business interactions as the key performance indicators. For a more comprehensive analytic application, the design could integrate an application similar to a fantasy league draft, where draft results for units in the sales pipeline could provide interesting information about predictions about which sales in the pipeline have the best chance of success.

What are design teams responsible for? Blogger Jeff McQuigg writes, “A BI system is a well thought out, planned and coordinated collection of efforts designed to produce a system that is so well organized it allows your user community to ask sophisticated questions of it and get those answers quickly and with a high degree of accuracy.” Fantasy leagues provide us with a successful real world analogy that we can use for building great OBIEE dashboards.

BIEE and BI Publisher's integration (Best Practice tip)

BI Publisher can gather data from different data sources, but with regards of the integration with BIEE two in particular are of our interest:

1. SQL Type
2. OBIEE Answers, termed Oracle BI Answers
   

The first type, allows us to connect to any database using a JDBC connection. The second type, allows us to connect to BIEE server by means of BI Answers queries.

What is the difference? Let's see. If we take the route with OBIEE Answers then in BI Publisher we get immediate results without any additional work:

For the above data set we get the following XML output:


Problem with Long Tag Names in RTF Templates

But one of the drawbacks of this approach is that we get long tag names, like for example: <_sales_facts_._amount_sold_>. These long tag names are difficult to handle in BI Publisher for RTF template development. For example, if the formula used to create the OBIEE Answer is a long CASE statement, the tag contains this long statement. This drawback is a problem because of Microsoft Word’s properties limitation. Any situation of form field is limited to 276 chars. That is 138 chars max per tab: Status Bar and Help Key (F1) ) as confirmed below:



Workaround for the Problem with Long Tag Names in RTF Templates
But using the following workaround, we still can access BI Server and leverage all its content. Simply go to same BI Answers query ==> Advanced tab and take the “logical sql”:


Next, paste this logical sql into the data model in BI Publisher and voila, we get the same results but with the labels associated: saw_0, saw_1, … saw_5.

At this point some work is required to mapping the saw_X columns with the corresponding ones in the BI Answers query to make the column names meaningful in our report. Renaming the columns does not present any limitations to our goal of pixel perfect reporting.

Now, if we execute the report just defined then we can see that the XML elements of the output file are shorter and can be accommodated to our taste.

OBIEE Answers on Essbase

I recently presented a session titled "OBIEE Answers on Essbase: The Future of Ad-hoc Analysis" at the Kaleidoscope conference in Monterey, CA (June, 2009). My focus was the interaction between Essbase and OBIEE Answers - - where it is now and where it's going. Topics discussed included:

• OBIEE Answers vs OBIEE Answers Plus
• Hyperion Web Analysis vs OBIEE Answers
• Why This Is Important
• OBIEE Answers On Essbase (Demonstration)
  

Here is a link to the presentation:
http://www.biconsultinggroup.com/images/videoalbum/bicg_kaleidoscope_v031.pdf

Essbase administrators should become familiar with the OBIEE (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition) file type "rpd". This "report definition file" contains the object definitions that allow Essbase outlines to be accessed using Oracle Answers and Oracle Dashboards. The presentation shows how to make this connection and begin using these tools together.

Any comments would be appreciated as we all explore this new BI functionality.

Kaleidoscope 2009 Conference Highlights

The Kaleidoscope 2009 conference was held this week in Monterey, CA (June 21 - 25). Sponsored by ODTUG (Oracle Development Tools Users Group), it offered over 150 technical sessions on all things Oracle. Check out the web site (www.odtugkaleidoscope.com) for session links. This may pique your interest or provide some insight into a new or existing technical area.

Another great resource is the ODTUG web site (www.ODTUG.com) which provides "community, technical resources and support for a wide range of technologists working with the Oracle platforms." I'm told that ODTUG members can download most of the Kaleidoscope presentations from the ODTUG site.

I presented a session titled "OBIEE Answers on Essbase: The Future of Ad-hoc Analysis". My focus was the interaction between Essbase and OBIEE Answers - - where it is now and where it's going. Happy to say that I learned of some companies using OBIEE Answers and Essbase in production settings. Many others are looking at it very closely and anticipating the OBIEE 11g release when this capability will improve dramatically.

One thing is clear - - Oracle has embraced Essbase as its go-forward multidimensional database and is putting a lot of development muscle behind making OBIEE even more Essbase friendly in the 11g release. Send me a note if you have any questions (doug.burke@biconsultinggroup.com). I will make my presentation available online with my next post.

Links:
www.odtugkaleidoscope.com
www.ODTUG.com