Review of the OBIEE Sample App v506

Little background – starting several years ago, Oracle has started providing public with a virtual machine with an image of the whole OBIEE stack. I think this has enabled multiple people to jump into OBIEE world much quicker and focus on the tool. In pre-VM era, if you wanted to deploy OBIEE 11g, you had to spend a few hours preparing infrastructure and installing the stack with DB).  This is my review and impressions of the Sample App v506.

I must tell you, this is the best release of the machine so far – in many aspects, including easiness of installation, comprehensive documentation, examples of best practices and stability. So the short version is, spend some time downloading it – must have. This is a very brief overview – and I’ve not yet had a chance to review Big Data – however, the support for the Cloudier Impala is huge. I think the product team is moving in the right direction.

Installation and performance: 

Installing this on my MacBook pro was very straightforward. Download and unzip the files. Import the resulting ova file into the VirtualBox 4.3. Network Configuration was straightforward as well. I’ve used default NAT – so using localhost:7780/analytics as a point of entry . The machine comes with a very detailed document on how to configure VM networking. I’m running it from an external USB3 drive – but the responsiveness is pretty good, considering how much stuff is there. For optimal performance, I’d recommend having 16Gb of RAM and SSD – that makes everything go faster.

Startup:

Once the VM is up. All you need to launch the demos is 1-click – literally – this hides a lot of complexity behind and allows you to quickly demo functionality / visualizations.

Content:

New content is highlighted with light-blue:

Plenty of new charts and visualizations – targeting latest trends (Big Data analysis, HTML5, web API graphs). I really like the new functionality of being able to search the columns in Answers:

OBIEE search Answers

A lot of map features and examples – this is extremely useful for working on spatial analytics. Spatial analytics demos are very impressive and work smoothly, like the example below:

This HTML5 chart is very impressive as well – there’s also an attached workshop on how to create such maps:

Overall, the value of the content is very high. I see a lot of various applications – for BI consultants, developers, analysts, end-users.

I also want to use the occasion and thank the BITECH DEMO team!