Oracle BI Suite EE 10.1.3.2 On General Release
I got back from Sweden yesterday evening, and saw from Abhinav's blog that Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition 10.1.3.2 (known as the "Maui" release) is now available for download on OTN. As well as the software, there's documentation and a couple of Oracle-by-Example tutorials, one on building dashboards and one on building the metadata layer. If all of this has piqued your interest, you might want to take a look at some of the articles I wrote on the previous release which are available here. Abhinav's also written an article on how you get it all installed.
So, this is the proper, full release of Oracle's new Enterprise Edition set of BI tools, after the "soft" release last year where the product was announced but all you could download was Siebel Analytics 7.8 from the edelivery.oracle.com site. Hopefully now we'll get expanded coverage of the products on OTN (currently there's just a single page that gives an overview of all the products, rather than a page + collatoral for each of the platform components) and maybe a forum or two for the products. Certainly now seems to be the kick-off point for proper coverage and publicity for the platform, and with the products being generally available we'll see developers starting to use the tools and work out how best to use them.
Anyway, I've downloaded the various zip files and I'll be updating my development environment as soon as possible. I might even be brave enough to try and install the Linux version, but I suspect in it's first release of this port it might have a few issues left to iron out - perhaps I'll leave that challenge to others. Looking through the Oracle by Example screenshots the various products look more or less the same as their previous Siebel versions (but now with a swish new Oracle look-and-feel), but reading through the press release and referring back to my Open World notes there's a whole bunch of new features such as automatic data mart creation, 64-bit support, RSS feeds, Oracle Enterprise Manager integration, enhanced MS Office support and so on. The challenge now is to try and get my BI Masterclass material updated in time for the next event at the end of February in Spain - expect a few postings here as I start to get to grips with the new features.