Oracle BI EE 11g - Upgrading from BI EE 10g

BI EE 11g is a significant feature filled release when compared with the previous 10g release. Most customers who are planning to upgrade to 11g have an automated way of upgrading their 10g Web Catalogs and repositories to the 11g version. When moving from 10g to 11g, we will have to go through the upgrade utility as there are significant changes to the repository structure and the web catalog structures. A direct copy & paste into the 11g version will not work.

The upgrade process involves the following steps

Install the new 11g version in either the same machine or a different machine.
Run the upgrade assistant utility to upgrade the repository & Web Catalogs.
Migrate other 10g specific customizations manually to the 11g instance. The different customizations are

a. Any Static files added to the 10g app server
b. Custom XML messages
c. Styles & Skins (The upgrades for this will have to be done carefully as some CSS & files have changed in this release)

Upgrade the Scheduler schema (Both BI Delivers & BI Publisher) through the upgrade utility
Upgrade BI Publisher

In this blog entry we shall see how to go about upgrading the RPD and Web Catalogs from the 10g to the 11g version. After installing 11g, start up the upgrade assistant utility from {ORACLE_HOME}/bin/ua (or ua.bat if you are on windows)

The upgrade assistant can be used to upgrade the scheduler schema, BI Publisher as well as the RPD & Web Catalogs. Lets start with the first option, i.e. upgrading RPD and Web Catalogs

In the upgrade screen, choose the 10g RPD along with the Web Catalog Path. In the Deliveries folder, choose the 10g deliveries path ({OracleBIData}/web/catalog/deliveries

In the next screen, provide the details of the weblogic server on which we will be deploying the Repository and Web Catalog to.

The upgrade utility does not seem to support remote deployments of the RPD and Web Catalog i.e. Upgrade Utility will only deploy the repository and web catalog on the machine containing the weblogic admin server.

The upgrade process will stop all the components first and then will do the individual RPD and Web Catalog Upgrade.

This is just a utility. We cannot expect all the reports to start working out of the box immediately after an upgrade. Good amount of testing is required to make sure all the older queries of the most commonly used reports are working without any major issues. Also, not all the reports would get migrated seamlessly due to the significant changes across the versions which the utility cannot recognize. Care has to be taken to make sure that all the warnings logged as part of the upgrade process are properly analyzed and corrected manually. A sample upgrade log is shown below (containing 4 warnings)