Examining the ongoing challenges of delivering high-quality, value-added ERP services in Higher Education.
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Where have you been my whole life,
Oracle VM VirtualBox and the
OBIEE 11.1.1.5 image?
Lurking in plain sight, probably advertised on Oracle corporate and
partner Twitter posts just outside the latest 50 each time I pulled out
my iPhone between meetings, in elevators, or waiting on line at SBUX. We
went through so much trouble configuring a demo machine (with Windows
Server 64-bit… ouch) when all we needed to do was hook up to a fat pipe,
download you, and turn the key to start.
I learned about the VirtualBox Image last week at
#OOW11
in San Francisco, in a throw-away comment from the product manager for
OBI Scorecards and Strategy. Flew home and checked the specs – 4 GB RAM?
I’ve got that on my home laptop. Fat pipe, not so much. It took nearly
12 hours to download the install packages from ftp.oracle.com but only
another hour to get OBIEE up and running.
Other than 4 GB of RAM, what does one need for this install? 7zip (http://www.7-zip.org/) and an FTP client (FileZilla -
http://filezilla-project.org/). And Oracle VirtualBox, which you can download from here:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/virtualbox/downloads/index.html
The real heavy lifting (for you network, anyhow) comes with the
SampleApp V107 Image. As you can see at
this link the download is roughly 25GB. This took forever over my slow Wifi on my slow at-home Comcast connection. The
installation guide
steps through all the (rather straight-forward) installation steps from
that point forward; it also contains all the passwords one needs to get
the party started.
Once connected, the
“General Index”
provides a learning map – literally hundreds of dashboard pages devoted
to individual concepts and terminology in OBIEE. For example, dig into
Section 0.2 to learn about the security set-up in the Sample App as well
as key features in OBIEE such as the “Act As” proxy option. Or navigate
to 3.20 to see various options for formatting your Answers reports. Or
visit 8.7 to see how OBIEE allows fidelity of interactivity between both
relational and flat-file data sources. After traipsing through each
dashboard and drilling down to “Edit” with the objective of sorting out
the underlying configuration, the power and flexibility of the
technology become obvious—and far more tangible than literature,
conference presentations, or canned demos.
More later this week after my hands are a little dirtier…
Labels: #OOW11, OBIEE, Oracle
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