Introduction:
Oracle BI users have been aware of the pending end-of-support status of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) for years. Depending on their OBIEE and Fusion Middleware versions, most users are now beyond Oracle’s Error Correct Support (ECS) deadline and are facing a migration.
Traditional data modeling, ETL, Datawarehousing are time-consuming especially for larger volume complex applications such as EBS, NetSuite
Legacy Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) is reaching end-of-life and updating existing reports is a resource-intensive process for highly specialized staff that delays delivery of insights
Incorta – a unified data analytics platform:
Incorta is a unified data and analytics platform designed to address modern data analytic challenges. It is an all-in-one solution that combines data acquisition, data processing, data curation, a semantic layer and data analysis, all accessible from a single web interface. Like OAC, Incorta is a fully managed cloud service with embedded BI tools. Incorta directly maps to Oracle and third-party data sources using its Direct Data Mapping technology. This eliminates traditional transformation and aggregation steps and delivers data to the business in record time.
Incorta fully automates or eliminates typically complex and time-consuming processes such as extracting data to staging areas, cleansing data and refining EDW table schemas to support analytic queries. Because data is stored in a query-ready format, there is no need to optimize EDW tables or build OLAP models. Incorta Data Apps (formerly Blueprints) include prebuilt reports, dashboards and business-friendly data views pre-tailored to popular Oracle and third-party business applications such as Oracle EBS, NetSuite and Oracle ERP. Because of these, implementation time can often be reduced from months to just weeks, reducing project costs and improving time to valu Incorta dramatically accelerates time to value
Migrating OBIEE Reports to Incorta:
The below high level processes simplifies migrating or replicating OBIEE reports/dashboards with an Incorta dashboards.
Installation of Data Applications (Incorta Data Apps):
Incorta Data apps provide ready-to-use analytic templates for popular business applications like Oracle E-Business Suite, ERP Cloud, NetSuite, SAP, JD Edwards and Salesforce. These data applications provide the physical schemas, business schemas and even dashboards. After installing a data application template in Incorta, only light customization is typically required to adjust for local preferences. The results can be dramatic, often reducing implementation times by several months. These can be deployed to your cluster from the Marketplace tab (available on Incorta Cloud and On premises starting with 5.2) and loaded with your own data very quickly.
During the data discovery phase, identify and group the OBIEE dashboard content that you want to migrate into Incorta. A module by module grouping can be effective as the data modeling on the Incorta side that supports the reporting will be contained. Use the OBIEE report usage statistics from the repository to prioritize the dashboards. This usage analysis provides the frequency that users access the dashboards and response times.
Use the NQuery logs to get the physical query that generates when the OBIEE report runs. Having that SQL available will help you as you build your data model in Incorta. The Incorta Data Apps may cover most of what you need but having the specifics of the tables and columns in the dashboards you intend to build in Incorta will make it easier to fill any gaps that remain.
One of the important concepts in Incorta is the Business Schema which allows you to define a layer of abstraction on top of Incorta physical schemas for business users. To simply the translation of OBIEE dashboards is to model your Incorta Business Schemas on the OBIEE Subject Areas that you use One Business Schema can correspond to one Subject Area and you can build a Business View to correspond to each folder within the Subject Area. This will give your report/dashboard builders a familiar set of data elements to work with.
In Incorta, you can put multiple reports, or Insights in Incorta parlance, onto a single dashboard tab and to create multiple tabs per dashboard. This allows users to have a lot more information together in one place which is generally more efficient for them. If your OBIEE dashboards consist of a single report, then you can take advantage of the migration to Incorta to enhance the experience for your users.
We can mimic the roles as defined in OBIEE in Incorta to manage access to the dashboard content that you create. Define the clear guidelines and differentiate power users and dashboard users using pre-defined Incorta roles. It is possible to emulate any row level security rules that you have established in OBIEE in Incorta using run time security filters and session variables
Venkat Nagalla
Senior Tech Lead
Data & Insights Practice