Abhinav Agarwal

The latest version of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, version 11.1.1.7.1, became available for download on the Oracle Technology Network.

You can download the software here.
The documentation library can be accessed here.

Some of the highlights of this release of Oracle BI Apps are:

• New applications, including Student Information Analytics, that provides an integrated view of admissions and recruiting, student records and student financials. It is certified with PeopleSoft Campus Solutions 9.0 (Bundle # 25),  and Indirect Spend Planning, that enables procurement teams to forecast indirect spend, and use packaged what-if modeling tools to reduce spend.
• Content enhancements to Financials, HR, Projects, CRM, Procurement and Spend Planning, and Supply Chain & Order Management Applications.
• New TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) tools, including a GUI based configuration and a functional setup tool.
• This version of BI Apps is based on the technology infrastructure of the Oracle BI EE 11.1.1.7.0 release.
• As an optional feature to this release, an enhanced ETL architecture using Oracle Golden Gate is now available.
• These BI Applications are now available with the next-generational ELT architecture of ODI (Oracle Data Integrator)

A busy season for analytics releases. Abhinav, 8th May 2013, Bangalore

The Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile Security Toolkit 11.1.1.7 for Apple iPad (iOS 5 & 6) is now available for download at http://goo.gl/Mq6rI


The Oracle BI Mobile Security Toolkit "provides the ability to generate a signed version of the Oracle BI Mobile HD application. The toolkit includes the instructions and necessary content to build this application making use of Apple’s Xcode and the IOS SDKs."

Please see my previous post, Oracle BI Mobile Security Toolkit, for more details.

Weekend, it's fast approaching.
Abhinav, 3 May 2013
Bangalore

Earlier in the week the latest bundle patch for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition - 11.1.1.6.10 - became available to Oracle customers on the My Oracle Support portal. "This patchset is available for all customers who are using Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11.1.1.6.0, 11.1.1.6.1, 11.1.1.6.2, 11.1.1.6.2 BP1, 11.1.1.6.4, 11.1.1.6.5, 11.1.1.6.6, 11.1.1.6.7, 11.1.1.6.8, and 11.1.1.6.9."

1. Oracle Business Intelligence Installer: Tracking Bug 16504136
2. Oracle Real Time Decisions: Tracking Bug 16504143
3. Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher: Tracking Bug 16504148
4. Oracle Business Intelligence ADF Components: Tracking Bug 16504154
5. EPM Components Installed from BI Installer 11.1.1.6.x: Tracking Bug 16504156
6. Oracle Business Intelligence: Tracking Bug: 16427939
7. Oracle Business Intelligence Platform Client Installers and MapViewer: Tracking Bug 16504161

You can search for this patchset on the My Oracle Support portal by using the "Recommended Patch Advisor" and selecting "Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition" from the "Product" dropdown and "11.1.1.6.0" from the "Release" dropdown. 
This will lead to the search results page listing all the available patches available.

Why are bundle patches recommended? They are recommended because these are a collection of critical bug fixes for a product or specific products. These patches can sometimes also contain minor enhancements as well as security updates. These patches undergo a rigorous set of tests before they are released for consumption by customers. Furthermore, these bundle patches are cumulative in nature, which means a bundle patch contains the contents of previous bundle patches that have been released. 
As always, you should carefully go over the documentation accompanying the bundle patch and come to a considered decision on applying the patch.
Thank you, Abhinav, 3 May 2013 Bangalore.

Oracle BI Apps book
(Image credit: Mc-Graw Hill) I cam to know of this book, Oracle Business Intelligence Applications: Deliver Value Through Rapid Implementations, written by veteran Oracle BI experts, Simon Miller and Will Hutchinson, published by Mc-Graw Hill, and expected to release in July 2013 (as per the publisher's site).

The authors, Simon Miller and Will Hutchinson have between them over 40 years of experience in the area of business intelligence, and are eminently qualified to write this book. I have worked with Simon for over seven years, and can speak to his knowledge in Oracle BI.

I look forward to the release of this book, and hope that practitioners of Oracle Business Intelligence Applications find this book to be a valuable aid in their work.

Table of Contents (from the publisher's web site):

1. Crash Course in Data Warehouse Survival
2. Don't Reinvent Any Wheels
3. Exalytics, Run, Don't Walk
4. Finance Analytics
5. Management Analytics
6. Manufacturing Analytics
7. Procurement and Spend Analytics
8. HR Analytics
9. EAM Analytics
10. Project Analytics
11. Sales Analytics
12. Service Analytics
13. Making It Your Own Without Ruining the Foundation 
14. Conclusions

ISBN: 9780071804141
Division: Professional
Pub Date: JUL-13
Pages: 432
Edition: 01
Format: Paperback

Happy prospective reading! Abhinav Bangalore, April 22, 2013
Mc-Graw Hill page Buying (pre-order) links: Amazon US, Kindle US, Amazon Canada, Kindle Canada, Amazon UK, Kindle UK

This is a very short post, and meant to clarify a point of potential confusion.
The recently released Oracle BI EE 11.1.1.7.0 release features integration with Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, both for use as a search engine and as a data source in BI Publisher.
However, this integration is for version 2.4 of Endeca Information Discovery (doc, download). Support for the recently released version 3.0 (doc, download) is planned and not yet available. 
I will post an update as and when I have more information to share.
Thank you folks, Abhinav Bangalore, 16 April 2013

An updated version of the Oracle BI Mobile HD app went live on the Apple iTunes App Store. This is an upgrade over the existing Oracle BI Mobile HD app, so users who have this app installed on their Apple iPad devices should see an update notification in their App Store app.

This update makes the app available for the recently released Oracle BI 11g 11.1.1.7.0 release - which means you can connect this app to an Oracle BI server running the latest version.


Happy analyzing.
Abhinav,
Bangalore, April 9, 2013

The latest release of Oracle Business Intelligence, 11g (11.1.1.7.0) is now available for download from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN). This is a significant release of Oracle BI and has enhancements across the stack.
A few of the more than 200 enhancements are:

• New visualizations, including the Performance Tile, Waterfall graph, 100 Percent Stacked Bar graph
• A new Visualizations Suggestion Engine
• Breadcrumbs for contextual awareness and navigation.
• Templates support for printing Dashboards
• Ability to freeze headers when navigating long tables or pivots
• Hadoop integration in the BI Server, which can now connect to Apache Hadoop data sources, fire off Hive QL queries across federated data sources.
• Use a new, faceted user interface to search for your web catalog content. Directly launch content with the search criteria passed through as filters/prompts from the search results.
• A model checker to flag off possible errors or warnings in your model. Can also be invoked via the command line, which makes it easy to automate.
• Improved document genration performance in BI Publisher
• A new report wizard in BI Publisher
• Layout editor enhancements and extensions in BI Publisher
• Support for local CSV and XML data sources in BI Publisher
• Create private JDBC connections in BI Publisher
• A new Smart View add-in with support for the BI Presentation catalog
• Embed dashboards, with support for dashboard prompts, and analyses using the Smart View add-in
• Create new analyses using Smart View and save them in your Excel workbook or back to the Presentation Catalog
• Use BI Publisher to directly report against Presentation Catalog subject areas without having to create data models beforehand
• Export dashboards to BI Publisher - the data models, layout, (supported) views and formats are carried over.
• Performance improvements in the Scorecard and Strategy product.
• Improved dashboard prompt support for Scorecards
• And much much more...

A few links are in order now.

• Download the software (after accepting the OTN License Agreement). The software is available for the following platforms:
  Windows x86 32 and 64-bits
  Linux x86 32 and 64-bits
  Sun Solaris x86-64 (64-bit)
  AIX (64-Bit)
  HPUX Itanium
• Documentation library
• SRSP (System Requirements and Supported Platforms) for Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 11gR1 (11.1.1.7.0) 
• Get the "Oracle Business Intelligence Developer Client Tools Installer"
• Release Notes
• The Repository Creation Utility is also available from the download page.

Over the coming days and weeks there will be a ton of information put out on this release on the Oracle.com site, and disseminated via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and other channels.
Happy downloading and thank you. Abhinav Bangalore, April 2, 2013

An update to the Oracle Business Intelligence Mobile HD app went live on the Apple iTunes App Store. This is the 11.1.1.6.9.1526 version of the app, and if you already have the Oracle BI Mobile HD app installed on your iPad device, you would have been notified via the App Store app (kind of redundant isn't it - calling it the "app" store "app"?) of the available upgrade.

As far as updates go, this version basically brings in bug and stability fixes, along with two minor enhancements. First, you can now change between landscape and portrait orientation when viewing content, and second, you can now send content as PDF attachments via email.






A new option on the "Settings" screen - "Display" - has been added to let users control how attachments should be displayed when sending them via email - "as Links", "as Attachments", or "as Inline". The "as Links" option basically means no attachment is included with the email, and only links to the content are included in the body of the email. The "as Attachments" option, when selected, adds a sub-option to the "Settings" screen, named "Format", which lets you select whether format of the attachments should be "PDF" or "HTML". The third option - "as Inline" - embeds the content inside the body of the email as rich HTML.


That's all folks.
Abhinav
Bangalore, Mar 26, 2013

The latest bundle patch for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11.1.1.6.0, 11.1.1.6.9, released a few days back.
Here are some more details on the patch and how to get it from the My Oracle Support site.
First, you can read Document 1536004.1 that provides details on this bundle patch as well as the the constituent patches of this bundle patch:

1. Patch 16287811 (1 of 7) Oracle Business Intelligence Installer. (generic)
2. Patch 16287778 (2 of 7) Oracle Real Time Decisions. (generic)
3. Patch 16237960 (3 of 7) Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher. (generic) 
4. Patch 16287840 (4 of 7) Oracle Business Intelligence ADF Components. (generic)
5. Patch 16287854 (5 of 7) Enterprise Performance Management Components Installed from BI Installer 11.1.1.6.x. (port-specific)
6. Patch 16227549 (6 of 7) Oracle Business Intelligence. (port-specific)
7. Patch 16287884 (7 of 7) Oracle Business Intelligence Platform Client Installers and MapViewer (generic)

Second, do read the readme file associated with this bundle patch that provides the installation instructions for applying these patches.

Third, this is a cumulative patch, and therefore includes all the fixes included in the 11.1.1.6.2, 11.1.1.6.4, 11.1.1.6.5, 11.1.1.6.6, 11.1.1.6.7 and 11.1.1.6.8 patch sets of the 11.1.1.6.0 release.

Thank you.
Abhinav,
Bangalore, March 18, 2013

Over the weekend our sustaining engineering team announced the availability of the latest bundle patch for OBIEE 11g - 11.1.1.6.9

I will post more details in a day or so.

A note on bundle patches: They are recommended because these are a collection of critical bug fixes for a product or specific products. These patches can sometimes also contain minor enhancements as well as security updates. These patches undergo a rigorous set of tests before they are released for consumption by customers. Furthermore, these bundle patches are cumulative in nature, which means a bundle patch contains the contents of previous bundle patches that have been released. 

Take care folks.
Abhinav,
Mar 11, 2013, Bangalore

Bundle Patch 11.1.1.5.5 for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, also known as 11.1.1.5.0 BP5, is now available for download from Oracle Support.

The easiest way to locate this bundle patch on Oracle Support is to search under the "Patches & Updates" tab with the id 15887317 - because that is the id of this patch.
21 bug fixes have been delivered in this bundle patch. Since bundle patches are cumulative, it also contains bug fixes from the earlier updates, including 11.1.1.5.0PS1, 11.1.1.5.0BP2, 11.1.1.5.0BP3, and 11.1.1.5.0BP4
Furthermore, this bundle patch is available for the following eight platforms:

• Microsoft Windows (32-bit) 
• Microsoft Windows x64 (64-bit) 
• Linux x86 (32-bit) 
• Linux x86-64 (64-bit) 
• Oracle Solaris on SPARC (64-bit) 
• Oracle Solaris on x86-64 (64-bit) 
• IBM AIX PPC (64-bit) 
• HPUX- IA (64-bit) 

Why are bundle patches recommended? They are recommended because these are a collection of critical bug fixes for a product or specific products. These patches can sometimes also contain minor enhancements as well as security updates. These patches undergo a rigorous set of tests before they are released for consumption by customers. Furthermore, these bundle patches are cumulative in nature, which means a bundle patch contains the contents of previous bundle patches that have been released. Therefore, to take a simple example, if you are on version 11.1.1.5.0, you do not have to install any of the bundle patches that have released since, and can apply bundle patch 11.1.1.5.5, secure in the knowledge that this bundle patch contains all the updates that went into bundle patch 11.1.1.5.4, which in turn contained all the fixes that went into bundle patch 11.1.1.5.3, and so on and so forth.

As always, you should carefully go over the documentation accompanying the bundle patch and come to a considered decision on applying the patch.

Thank you.
Abhinav,
30 Jan, 2013
Bangalore

It's a one-day workshop. It's on Big Data. It's free. What more could you want?
Ah yes, some details. You will find them on Keith Laker's blog post, Data Warehousing and Big Data from an Oracle Perspective: OTN Developer Day - Free Oracle Big Data Workshop

The bare bones about the Big Data workshop are:
When: Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Where:  Oracle's HQ in Redwood Shores, California
How Much: Free.
Ok, seriously, how much? It's Free
What will you learn: As much as you want to.
What will be taught:

• Write MapReduce on Oracle’s Big Data Platform
• Manage a Big Data environment
• Access Oracle NoSQL Database
• Manage Oracle NoSQL DB Cluster
• Use data from a Hadoop Cluster with Oracle
• Develop analytics on big data

Anything more? Yes, check Keith Laker's blog post for more.
Happy second last day of Jan, 2013 Abhinav, Banglaore