Saturday, June 25, 2016

Oracle Business Intelligence 12.2.1.1.0 is available

The latest release of OBI 12c - Oracle Business Intelligence 12.2.1.1.0 is available at OTN


Please note there is a new Oracle Business Intelligence Developer Client Tool for download as well.

The 12.2.1.1.0 documentation is here.

The upgrade is described as in-place in the upgrade guide, but is different from what we have seen in 11g:
Upgrading to Oracle Business Intelligence from 12.2.1.0 to 12.2.1.1 is an in-place upgrade performed by Upgrade Assistant. You install the 12.2.1.1 product distribution in a new Oracle home and then use the Upgrade Assistant to upgrade the 12.2.1.0 schemas and domain configuration. You also use the Reconfiguration Wizard to reconfigure the 12.2.1.0 domain.


New Features:


The publisher new features are described in this OTN document and this blog include:
  • Integration using RESTful APIs
  • Delivering documents to Oracle Document Cloud Service
  • Using Web Center Content as a Data Source
  • Attach PDF to your Invoices
  • Deliver E-mail Body in HTML format along with Report as attachment
  • Manage Custom Fonts as self service feature
  • Manage PGP Keys for FTP Delivery Encryption
  • Manage large size reports better. Using Dynamic Memory Guard
  • Enabling Encryption for File Data Security on Cloud
  • Better Integration with 11g migration tools

New Features for Oracle Data Visualization Users seems to close the gaps with DVD (Desktop Data Visualization) latest enhancements:
  • Using Oracle Applications as source (existing Analysis seems to be the common case).
  • Using direct databases link as source
  • Size of data files to upload to 50MB
  • Modify uploaded data sources - including editing columns, and creating new ones for use in projects
  • Use new and enhanced visualization types - Visualize data using donut charts and see data series trends using a trend line. You can also link to URLs and insights in tiles, images, and text boxes, and use Chrome for Windows or Android to dictate descriptions.
  • Customize your color schemes
  • Move filter panels in projects
  • Data wrangling — update data sources after upload
  • Share reports with others on a read-only basis
  • New ways to present data visualizations: Donut charts, Tile views, Free Text boxes
  • Change data blending

New Features for Analysis and Dashboard Users:
  • Ability to sort graph, heat matrix, pivot table, table, treemap, and trellis views by using a context menu (right-click).
  • A new view type named heat matrix. Heat matrices are two-dimensional representations of data in which values are characterized by a gradient of colors.
  • Adding data from an uploaded external source to an analysis.  
  • Scale for % (x 100) component in the Column Properties dialog: Specify whether to multiply data by a 100 to display it as a percentage when setting the properties of a column.
  • Style and customize KPI Watchlists and every watchlist that appears in a scorecard. You can set custom styles for each watchlist and rename and change the order and visibility of the watchlist columns.
  • Advanced page properties to specify incoming navigation parameters you want to set on the current dashboard page. This enables you to control how parameters associated with the navigation actions are applied .
Few more new features:
  • In RPD, Data Driven Fragment Selection in Logical Table Sources (default, disabled )
  • For security, Catalog groups are not supported anymore and you must use application roles.
  • New Service ("AnalysisExportViews Service") and new Structures, new Methods and updates to Oracle BI Server XML Procedures are described in Integrators guide here.
  • Datasources

    AT Release Notes we can see that: Additional ODBC data sources are supported for Oracle BI EE 12.2.1.1.0. The data sources using ODBC DataDirect 7.1.5 include Amazon Redshift, Oracle Service Cloud, and Teradata.
    Interesting to note that in certification matrix here, in the database tab, for BI Product, we see few new entries:  Apache Spark SQL, Google BigQuery, MongoDB, PostgreSQL. Few new versions support; MySQL 5.7.*, MS SQL Server and MS Analytic Services  (2014), Teradata (15.0 and 15.1), Hive 0.10+.
    Under OBIEE Apps & other Datasources we see Saleforce (Spring 16+ version), Amazon Redshift (1.0.1036+), Impala 1.3+.