BizTech Blog

The architecture for Oracle Business Intelligence Applications (OBIA) includes several components. Understanding these components is prerequisite to a successful OBIA implementation. A brief description of each component is included below the diagram.

I recently read an article from Software Advice called the BI Buzzword Breakdown. The article highlighted the confusion around business intelligence (BI) terms and asked experts to provide their own definitions. While a quick visit to wikipedia will define most business intelligence terms, we as practitioners have learned that successful BI implementations require significant support and interaction with business users. The IT-led 'build it and they will come' strategy, just plain does not work. Thus, we need to be able to translate from techy terms to business terms. As a compliment to the software advice article, I would like to attempt to explain some of the key terms as if I was speaking to a fictitious business executive, who I will call Amy.

When Fusion Middleware Applications are installed there is a default user (weblogic or a specific name that you provide) that is created during the domain creation which acts as a super user for all Middleware Applications. This post walks through the process of resetting the weblogic password in an event that it’s lost.

1. Shutdown Weblogic Server and all associated applications.
2. Set the Weblogic Server environment variables –
   $DOAMIN_HOME/bin/setDomainEnv.sh
3. Navigate to $DOMAIN_HOME/security and rename the DefaultAuthenticatorInit.ldift file.
4. Create an initialization file in the same directory using the below command –
   java weblogic.security.utils.AdminAccount <weblogic_user_name> <weblogic_password> .
5. This will create a new DefaultAuthenticatorInit.ldift file.
6. Navigate to $DOMAIN_HOME/servers/AdminServer and rename the data directory.
7. Repeat step 6 for all the managed servers which are part of the domain.
8. If boot.properties is used, recreate them with the username and password that was provided in Step 4.
9. Start Admin Server and make sure you can login using the new credentials.
10. Start the rest of the services

Note: This process will remove all the user accounts in the weblogic domain and only the new user that is created will be present and act as a super user.

As business intelligence software technologies have matured, organizations have begun to expand the use of business intelligence software, like Oracle Business Intelligence, beyond reporting from data warehouses. Using tools like Oracle business intelligence to report off of operational systems such as Oracle EBS has become commonplace. So the question becomes, what is the difference between analytical and operational reporting and how should an organization architect a solution for each reporting type.

Recently Mark Hurd, Oracle President and Balaji Yelamanchili, Oracle Senior Vice President, Analytics and Performance Management, unveiled the latest advances in Oracle’s strategy for analytics. The webcast focused on the latest developments in business intelligence technology and applications, advanced analytics, performance management applications, and engineered systems. Key points included how to:

• Deliver real-time intelligence to your mobile workforce globally
• Forecast and plan at the speed of business
• Accelerate your financial close and reporting process

Click this link to watch the webcast.

If you are reading this blog, you are probably like me in that you downloaded a 10.x update to Firefox and found that OBIEE no longer works. Here is a quick and dirty workaround until Oracle is ready with a patch:

The latest release of Oracle Business Intelligence 11g, 11.1.1.6 is now downloadable from OTN for Windows, Linux, Solaris, and AIX @ http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bi-enterprise-edition/downloads/biee-111150-393613.html

And, the OBIEE 11.1.1.6 Documentation Library is online @ http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/bi.htm

This is the OBI Foundation version that is used to support the new Exalytics in-memory BI machine.

OBIEE 11g provides a number of different ways to integrate with authentication services. This post shows how to authenticate users with an existing AD solution.

The migration process for 11g is a little bit different from 10g in that the deployment of a new web catalog and repository is taken care of through the weblogic enterprise manager. The repository is uploaded through the application, while the web catalog still needs to be manually copied onto the server. To make it easy on yourself, just copy the contents of the catalog folder from test into the existing catalog folder in production. One thing to be aware of is that underlying security is taken care of in the weblogic layer now, so you will need to take that into consideration if your test and prod environments are different (or just have different application roles set up).

This entry will discuss how to utilize OBIEE 10g capabilities to authorize and authenticate your users. Authentication will be administered by an external LDAP solution, while authorization will be controlled in the datawarehouse and administered using writeback capability.