Oracle BI EE 11g - Incremental Web Catalog Migration

Yesterday, we saw how to go about patching repositories so that the entire process of migration from development to production can be automated. That patching process was basically an extension of the 3 way merge process. In 10g, 3 way merging was supported in Web Catalogs as well. I had blogged about it here. But the biggest downside was, it had to be done very carefully as there were chances of losing a lot of objects. In 11g, web catalog incremental migration is supported with more granular control on how the 3 way merge happens.

The high level architecture of the patching process for web catalogs is given below

Creating the Patch:

Applying the Patch:

So the process more or less is the same as the Repository Patching process. To start with lets assume we have a webcatalog called SampleAppBaseline which will be our baseline web catalog that is already in production (SampleAppProd). Due to a change request, lets assume following are the changes that were made to the SampleAppBaseline webcatalog.

1. One report was deleted - A report called ChartZoom has been deleted 2. One report was modified - A report called Filters has been modified 3. One new report was created - A report called SampleSales has been created

The name of this new web catalog is SampleAppChanged. Web Catalog patching is done through the Catalog Manager command line options. In 10g this was not documented as shown here. In 11g, we have much more comprehensive set of options that makes scripting catalog manager related tasks a lot easier. So we start with first creating the diff file using the following command

./runcat.sh -cmd diff -baseline /home/oracle/SampleAppBaseline -latest /home/oracle/SampleAppChanged -outputFile /home/oracle/SampleAppDiff.txt -folder /shared -verbosity detail

Lets look at the diff file to see what the contents are.

As you see all the changes that were made to the web catalog have now come into this diff file. Remember we can now control whether we want to migrate the permissions as well from one web catalog to the other. Now the next step is to create a patch file out of this diff file by comparing the changes in the diff file with the production web catalog.

./runcat.sh -cmd createPatch -inputFile /home/oracle/SampleAppDiff.txt -outputFile /home/oracle/SampleAppPatch.txt -production /home/oracle/SampleAppProd

If we look at the patch file, it will look similar to the diff file. Basically this provides us with an opportunity to pick & choose the changes that we want to apply in to the production web catalog (through command line options)

By modifying the PRODUCTION webcatalog name in the patch file we can apply multiple patches simultaneously to different web catalogs (like UAT, PROD etc). To apply the patch we just need to fire the following command

./runcat.sh -cmd applyPatch -inputFile /home/oracle/SampleAppPatch.txt -outputFile /home/oracle/SampleAppPatched.txt

If we now open the production web catalog we should now be seeing all the changes applied automatically. Remember to test this out completely in development before finalizing the scripts in production. I have seen instances(on my test sand box) where the patch files seem to somehow not pick up the changes automatically (had to enforce it through timestamp differences).