Looking Closer at BI Suite EE 10gR3

I've been spending all my spare time recently on the book I'm working on, and so deliberately stayed away from the new Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition so that I didn't get distracted. I've got a couple of days free now, and as the new versions of all these bits of software - BI Enterprise Edition, BI Publisher and so on - have just made whole sections of my Oracle University BI Masterclass material obsolete, I downloaded all the software and upgraded my development environment this morning.

The install went fine, easier than a normal Oracle installation to be honest, as there's no Universal Installer and you just use a Windows InstallShield installer instead - not sure how this will work with the Linux version though, when I get a chance I'll try and install this as well. Compared to the previous Siebel Analytics install, you need a Java JDK1.5 or higher (I used JDK 1.6) rather than JDK1.4, and you don't need to separately install the J2EE web component into an application server, it comes with a standalone OC4J container, although you get the option of installing in to Oracle Application Server 10.1.3 as well. All told, a surprisingly painless exercise, although as I said installing it into a proper Application Server environment, or on Linux, or on Microsoft IIS, might be a bit more complicated.

One I started it up and logged in to the Dashboard application, it all looked fairly familiar compared to Siebel Analytics 7.8. There's a new Oracle 11g look and feel (blue is obviously the new red), but the dashboard functionality looks much the same as before.

One nice touch with this new release is the "Paint" dataset and demo dashboard - it doesn't need a database, and instead uses a set of XML data files stored under the \OracleBI\Server\Sample\Paint directory. This means you can get up and running and play around with the dashboard, even before you connect the server to a database.

Taking a look around OracleBI Interactive Dashboards first, the functionality of the portlets and reports themselves look much as before, although portlets containing lists of reports and other directories now have XML RSS links, so that you can subscribe to reports using an RSS Reader.

Looking along the top of the page, where the list of links to other Siebel Analytics programs used to be, this has been modified slightly to show only Dashboards and Answers, with the other products reached through a drop-down. Notice the BI Publisher link there - I'll come on to that in a second.

Other than that, on the surface, the Dashboard product looks much the same. Going on to Answers, again there's a new look and feel, but the layout and process of building a report stays as before.

I did notice a few new features as I built some reports - at one point, a "Create iBot" button appeared next to the report, allowing me to schedule it and run a later date, and of course there's a bunch of new features documented elsewhere that I've not had a chance yet to look at.

One thing that did catch my eye was the BI Publisher integration. In the previous, Siebel Analytics 7.8 release, formatted (as opposed to ad-hoc) reporting was provided through Actuate, a reporting tool Oracle OEM'd and bundled with the suite. In this release, Actuate has been replaced with BI Publisher, which of course is the new name for XML Publisher. I did actually download and start using BI Publisher a couple of weeks ago (I'm writing an article for it for OTN) but it was nice to see it integrated in with BI Enterprise Edition; the integration has gone pretty well and you wouldn't know you're going from one technology to another, at least initially. BI Publisher gets installed along with the rest of the BI EE tools, and all the configuration and wiring in is done for you, so that you can start building reports off of the BI Enterprise Edition metadata layer (the "Common Enterprise Information Model").

Once you select BI Publisher from the menu, you launch out into the BI Publisher Enterprise Environment, with security and user details being picked up from the Presentation Services server (the new name for the Siebel Analytics Web server, or "Oracle BI Web" as they were calling it at one point). Once you're in, you get the standard BI Publisher Enterprise interface...

As you can see, Oracle have more or less matched the visual style of BI Suite Enterprise Edition, which itself is I take it the visual style of E-Business Suite 11i. Anyway, when you go to create a new report, you now have the option to create your report against the logical tables in the BI Server Common Enterprise Information Model, or against the columns in an Answers report, or you can just connect directly via SQL or XML/HTTP/Web Services.

In my case, I connected to the BI EE metadata layer and created a report against the Global Electronics business model.

The Query Builder lets you graphically construct your query against the BI EE logical tables, which it then copies into the SQL Query window to create your data model. One slight inconsistency I noticed was that you have to edit the resulting query to add SUM() and GROUP BY clauses to the SQL statement, which you don't have to do when working with Answers, as it picks up the default aggregation method from the metadata layer. Obviously BI Publisher doesn't have access to that - it thinks it's just dealing with a set of relational tables, via an ODBC link - and so you have to go in and add any aggregation elements to the SQL that it generates. That's not to do down what they've done - other than that, the integration is very impressive - but you can see how Oracle might improve it in future: Have the Query Builder directly access all the logical table metadata as well as just the table definitions. A good first release though.

Once you've defined the BI Publisher data model, you then use the BI Publisher Desktop add-in to lay out your report template, in the same way as XML Publisher. One improvement in BI Publisher desktop is that you don't need to re-key the SQL statement into the Report Wizard; now, you log on to the BI Publisher server directly from within Word, like this:

Then you get presented with report catalog, where you can either select from the reports (and their data models) in the BI Publisher catalog, or you can pick a OracleBI Answers report and use that as your data source. In my case, I pick up the BI Publisher report I just created, and press "Open Report" to pick up the data and start laying the template out.

I think we're almost at the point now where BI Publisher can be used by end-users, rather than just by developers; the report definition phase can be a lot simpler now, as the dataset can be created using the BI Server metadata layer, which is the same as if you could create reports against the Discoverer End User Layer, a feature Reports should have had years ago. Once the data model is complete, the end-user can pick up the dataset using the dialog above, so there's no need to expose him or her to the underlying SQL. It's still not as simple as Cognos Impromptu, which is often the benchmark for simple, formatted reporting, but it's certainly getting there.

Other than changes to the main products, OracleBI Delivers looks broadly the same; one of the new features I was looking for was the ability to kick-off a BPEL process from an iBot, which doesn't seem to be there yet, at least not directly - you can however call a generic Java program or bit of Javascript, which could act as a wrapper for your BPEL process instead.

Coming away from the Presentation Services server now, going over to the OracleBI Administration tool, this seems pretty much unchanged (on the surface, at least) compared to the Siebel Analytics Administration tool. A couple of new features I did notice though were the Consistency Check Manager, which lists out any issues you might have with the metadata model:

Also, I seem to remember from Open World last year that there are new team development features to help when multiple people are working with and checking in changes to the repository; I'll have to take a look at this earlier as I believe team working was one of the weaker points of the earlier Siebel Analytics releases.

Taking a look at the server installation itself, it's more or less the same file layout, with a NQSConfig.INI file holding the server parameters but with the repository and other server directories now held under the \Server directory under the main BI Server installation directory. I did try and copy across a repository file from my Siebel Analytics 7.8 installation, re-create the references it to it in the NQSConfig.INI file and then see if it worked, but the Presentation Services fell over afterwards. There's probably an upgrade method in the documentation somewhere, but it does seem that you can't just take a Siebel Analytics 7.8 repository file and expect it to work in Maui.

Anyway, that's my first impressions with the new release of the Suite. Overall, it's recognizably Siebel Analytics but with spruced-up Oracle look and feel, with the major new addition being the BI Publisher integration, which overall is done very well. The "fit and finish" is of a very high quality, and being honest they're benefiting here from the more "Web 2.0" approach that Siebel took as compared to the rather clunky Java applet approach that Oracle took with Discoverer. It'll be interesting to see how the two technology streams develop over time - I predict the Siebel BI technology framework will win out over time, it's just so much closer to what people expect in terms of a user interface these days.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be posting more on BI Suite Enterprise Edition, in the context of migraton from Oracle Discoverer. I'll also be posting on the new Oracle Data Integrator, as I'm due to present on this and Discoverer migration at a fair few user group events in the next few months.