Upgrading to OBIEE 12c
Where You Are Now
OBIEE 12c has been out for some time, and it seems like most folks are delaying upgrading to OBIEE 12c until the very last minute. Or at least until Oracle decides to put out another major version change of OBIEE, which is understandable. You’ve already spent time and money and devoted hundreds of resource hours to system monitoring, maintenance, testing, and development. Maybe you’ve invested in staff training to try to maximize your ROI in your existing OBIEE purchase. And now, after all this time and effort, you and your team have finally gotten things just right. Your BI engine is humming along, user adoption and stickiness are up, and you don’t have a lot of dead objects clogging up the Web Catalog. Your report hacks and work-arounds have been worked and reworked to become sustainable and maintainable business solutions. Everyone is getting what they want.
Sure, this scenario is part fantasy, but it doesn’t mean that as a BI team lead or member, you’re not always working toward this end. It would be nice to think that the people designing the tools with which we do this work understood the daily challenges and processes we must undergo in order to maintain the precarious homeostasis of our BI ecosystems. That’s where IDB Sols Ltd comes in. If you’re considering upgrading to OBIEE 12c, or are even curious, keep reading. We’re here to help.
So Why Upgrade
Let’s get right down to it – Upgrading to OBIEE 12c offers many exciting new features that shouldn’t be ignored.
How IDB Can Help
We understand what it is to be presented with so many project challenges. Do you really want to risk the potential perils and pitfalls presented by upgrading to OBIEE 12c? We work both harder and smarter to make this stuff look good. And we get the most out of strategy and delivery via a number of in-house tools designed to keep your OBIEE deployment in tip top shape.
Maybe you want to make sure all your Catalog and RPD content gets ported over without issue? Instead of spending hours on testing every dashboard, report, and other catalog content post-migration.
What to Expect
You might be wondering what kinds of issues you can expect to experience during upgrading to OBIEE 12c (which is to say, nothing’s going to break, right?). Are you going to have to go through a big training curve? Does upgrading to OBIEE 12c mean you’re going to experience considerable resource downtime as your team, or an even an outside company, manages this process? To answer this question, I’m reminded of a quote from the movie Fight Club: “Choose your level of involvement.”
While we always prefer to work alongside your BI or IT team to facilitate the upgrade process, we also know that resource time is valuable and that your crew can’t stop what they’re doing until things wraps up. We often find that the more clients are engaged with the process, however, the easier the hand-off is because clients better understand best practices, and IT and BI teams are more empowered for the future.
Learning More about OBIEE 12c
But if you’re like many organizations, maybe you have to stay more hands off and get training after the upgrade is complete. Like our hugely popular 11g course, this program is five days of back-to-front instruction taught via a selection of seminars and hands-on labs, designed to impart most everything your team will need to know to continue or begin their successful BI practice.
What we often find is that, in addition to being a thorough and informative course, the Bootcamp is a great way to bring together teams or team members, often dispersed among different offices, under one roof to gain common understanding about how each person plays an important role as a member of the BI process. Whether they handle the ETL, data modeling, or report development, everyone can benefit from what often evolves from a training session into some impromptu team building.
Feel Empowered
If you’re still on the fence about whether or not to upgrade, as I said before, you’re not alone. There are lots of things you need to consider, and rightfully so. You might be thinking, “What does this mean for extra work on the plates of my resources? How can I ensure the success of my project? Is it worth it to do it now, or should I wait for the next release?” Whatever you may be mulling over, we’ve been there, know how to answer the questions, and have some neat tools in our utility belt to move the process along. In the end, I hope to have presented you with some bits to aid you in making a decision about upgrading to OBIEE 12c, or at least the impetus to start thinking about it
The OBIEE 12c Data Visualization documentation details all the changes. What I’ve found most interesting is the following:
- Ability to use the results from existing OBIEE reports in Oracle Data Visualization.
- Ability to source data from external databases. My blog on DVD explains this further.
- Users can upload data files up to 50MB in size (a significant improvement over the previous version)
- Uploaded data can be modified in Oracle Data Visualization, including editing columns, creating new calculations and more.
- Color Schemes can be customized with an option to change for the entire dashboard on Canvas Settings -> Project Properties, or you can change individual visualizations using Menu -> Color -> Manage Color Assignments.
- You can even add text boxes for users to annotate their data or provide comments to other users.
- Finally, the new Presentation Mode hides the editor components and effectively allows you to embed a Data Visualization project into an OBIEE Dashboards, as projects can be made read-only which allows them to function much the same way as “classic” OBIEE dashboard reports.
All in all, this latest update essentially gives OBIEE 12c users a fully function thin client version of Oracle DVD yet allowing users to continue to be able to source data from OBIEE data sources. OBIEE 12c now gives users the best of both worlds with an enterprise level “single version of the truth” along with the self-service capabilities that can be found in other desktop focused data visualization products.
References
12.2.1.1.0 Documentation: https://docs.oracle.com/middleware/12211/biee/docs.htm
Release Notes: https://docs.oracle.com/middleware/12211/biee/BIERN/toc.htm
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