I’ve finally had a minute to watch the inaugural video episode of the new web show, Real Time BI, with hosts Kevin McGinley and Stewart Bryson. The show’s concept is great for speed conversation on all topics related to Oracle Business Intelligence.

I was delighted that these guys thought of me as one of their first guests along with Chet Justice of ORACLENERD.com.  For some reason my audio came in a bit low so pump up the volume to hear my rants and untimely interruptions to conversation topics.

A big thanks to Kevin and Stewart.  I hope that they take this act on the road and get some real-time interviews at some of the big conferences like Collaborate and KScope this year.  I’ll look forward to watching some more and I hope to garner and invitation back after the Oracle BI 11g book is published

Related articles

• Interview with Steward Bryson of RittmanMead – Episode #7 (artofbi.com)
• http://vimeo.com/channels/realtimebi

I received a comment on one of the last post regarding upgrading a Oracle BI 11.1.1.6 from 11.1.1.5 and why I recommended doing a out-of-place upgrade, i.e. deinstall and re-install of the updated version, versus using a patch of 11.1.1.6 over 11.1.1.5.  So on a plane ride a few weeks ago I made a short list of reasons to clarify.

Oracle (Photo credit: joepub)

I made the comment that I “recommend conducting a re-install of Oracle BI 11g (for 11.1.1.6) instead of conducting an in-place upgrade” and “…an in place upgrade is a bad idea in my opinion”. Let’s be clear, that this statement was made regarding a minor patch release and not a release patch of Oracle BI 11g.  The former requires the download of all compressed installation files while the latter requires the download of a single one-off patch file/script that is then executed using OPatch.

If that’s clear then here are the top X reasons I would recommend conducting a full de-install and re-install of the Oracle BI 11g platform when upgrading minor releases:

1.  The Oracle documentation does not describe one approach as a best practice versus the other.

2. All major artifacts such as WebLogic Security, Applications Roles/Privilege files, Custom Folders, RPD, web catalog can be easily archived and restored just as easily.  This in my opinion should already be conducted via a weekly backup process so that the key artifacts can be easily retrieved, especially if operating in a highly used OBIEE environment.

3. The RCU database tables, etc. can be data dumped and restored carefully enough into the new RCU MDS/BIPLATFORM schemas.  Selecting just the core pieces from these schemas such as auditing, usage tracking ,etc. can be done quite efficiently using INSERT backups or similar routine with your favorite SQL IDE.

4. Most companies haven’t leveraged Oracle BI 11g to its fullest anyway so conducting this full effort for the larger percentage of users this is no more disruption to the environment that the in-place upgrade and possibly less since the team will have been familiar with the Oracle BI 11g de-install and install process.  The advantage here is experienced gained – see next reason.

5. The OBI team becomes much more versed to the workings of the Oracle BI architecture by doing an uninstall and re-install

6. A de-install prevents the chance of screwing something up in the under pinnings of the FMW environment by modifying critical pieces of the environment using a non-automated upgrade process such as the inlace upgrade.

High-Availability configurations of Oracle BI 11g would be my only hesitation with this logic, but again, the fact that the original installation should have been very well documented should allow a de-install to be more efficient than an in-place upgrade.  Taking also into consideration that if a team wants to move from 11.1.1.5 to 11.1.1.6 then this is already an effort where they will have to schedule time for the process, such as downtime of the system, etc. They might as well do it right the first time with no chance of having backlash later on with an issue that they can’t track down.  We’ve seen how deep that FMW file structure is, right?  So, get the experience, and reduce the chance for any hidden problems from arising.

I’m curious to any feedback you may offer.

Thanks to Robin for asking the burning question which prompted this reply post.

Related articles

• Oracle BI 11.1.1.6 SampleApp VM Image – Do it Yourself (artofbi.com)
• Upgrading Oracle BI 11g Apps (artofbi.com)

The release of the 11.1.1.6 version of Oracle BI is bringing many BI enthusiast to open mouthed excitement over the last couple of weeks.  Others are quite peeved at its seemingly “silent”, laissez-faire, un-promoted release and the questionable enhancements that bring angst to upgrading the just recently installed 11.1.1.5 (or dare I say 11.1.1.3) version of the tool.

upgrade (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

Which ever side you happen to be on let me first state that if you haven’t already you should upgrade to this release.  Although Oracle really needs to work on their understanding of Semantic Versioning this minor release is backwards compatible, of course, to previous 11g versions and provides just enough new features to warrant an in-place upgrade. BTW, an in place upgrade is a bad idea in my opinion, and you should just deinstall and reinstall the instance if you are going to go to the latest version.

The SampleApp V107 that was released with 11.1.1.5 was brilliant thanks to Lakshmi at Oracle.  I’m talking more specifically about the VirutalBox VM Image.  You know the 25GB download that you then had to tool with, load up on your machine, and over the last few months you’ve added development tools, custom scripts, etc.  There is no 11.1.1.6 VM image as of yet, so you’ll need to be smart about it and just replace the OBI 11.1.1.5 software with 11.1.1.6.   This post tells you how, step-by-step.

One little thing to keep in mind is that the VM Image for OBI 11g (11.1.1.15) is actually a 32-bit VM Image.  So, you must download the 32-bit (x86) version of Oracle BI 11.1.1.6 for Linux in order for the installation to even start up.

Here we go….

1. Download the 5 required Oracle BI 11.1.1.6 zip (Linux x86) files from OTN to your host machine (laptop or server where VirtualBox is running).  Don’t download these files to the VM Image itself as there may note be enough disk space if you’ve never increased the disk space size (run a df -h command from the terminal to verify).  You’ll also need to download the RCU zip file again.  If running a Windows host download these files to an arbitrary folder like C:\downloads\.
2. Get your existing VirtualBox VM Image of Oracle BI 11.1.1.5 ready.  That is to say, take a back up of the web catalog or RPD and any other artifacts you may have post-configured from the default such as skins / styles, etc.  Back them up to the /home/oracle/ directory so that they are out of the /bishiphome path. We are only going to mess with the Oracle BI FMW directory on the VM Image, /bishiphome.  If you are really paranoid, you can zip/tar compress the entire VM Image but that will require extra disk space and more time.
3. Start the VM Image, make sure all BI and WLS related components are stopped.  The Oracle DB on the vm image starts up at boot and again we are only focused on the BI FMW directory so everything else on the VM will remain intact while we upgrade to OBI to 11.1.1.6.
4. Start just the WebLogic Server itself so that the AdminServer is running, not the whole shebang like BI components, etc. So basically from the StartupScripts folder on the desktop, run 1-startOID and 2-startWLS (just startWLS really should do it).
5. FTP the new 11.1.1.1.6 RCU zip file to the VM Image or use the shared folder option to copy it to the VM Image.  The best bet is to place this zip in the /home/oracle/ path because it (besides the /epm) path should have the most available space remaining.
6. Unzip the RCU zip file to reveal the rcuHome directory.  You’ll need this in a minute during the deinstall process to drop the MDS and BIPLATFORM scheme objects.
7. Following the deinstall documentation for Oracle BI 11g conduct the following steps in order but with a bit of modification.
   • From /bishiphome/Middleware/Oracle_BI/oui/, run the ./runInstaller -deinstall command from a terminal window and select the option to deInstall the AS Instances Managed by WebLogic Domain.
   • Use the StartupScripts folder to now stop Weblogic server by double-clicking stopWLS.sh and running it in the terminal.
   • Once that completes start the rcu deinstall process from /home/oracle/rcuHome/rcu/bin/, run the ./rcu command.  Enter the VM Images DB system credentials (sys / oracle) and select the Drop option and on the prefix screen select the BIRCU prefix to drop.  This is where the MDS and BIPLATFORM schemes are referenced.  If you get a BIRCU_MDS is connected to the database error then you still have a terminal window open for WLS – kill it.
   • Once that completes return to the /bishiphome/Middleware/Oracle_BI/oui/ directory, run the ./runInstaller -deinstall option again and select the DeInstall Oracle Home option.  Run the process. Click Yes to deinstall the OBI directory.
   • At this point you have safely removed the BI pieces. Lastly, in a terminal window, navigate to /bishiphome. Remove the Middleware directory by entering and executing the command, rm -rf Middleware
8. Don’t be worried about the last step above.  This works perfectly in a Linux environment because these directories are self-contained and the environment variables are not set automatically or in hard to find places like in a Windows OS.  Plus we will reinstall into the same FMW home as the one that was just removed.  Likewise we will restore the MDS and BIPLATFORM schemes to the same prefix via the RCU in the next steps.
9. Now, create a directory off of /bishiphome called /downloads by using the mkdir /downloads command while in the /bishiphome directory.
10. As the Oracle user, recreate the /bishiphome/Middleware directory by using the command mkdir /bishiphome/Middleware/ .  Be certain that you do this step correctly as the existing options such as StartOBI, etc. are looking to reference this path.  Be sure to use the Oracle user to create this directory and not the root user.
11. You may at this point want to check the size of the mounts on the VM Image so run a df -h command to see how much available space you have on each mount.  This will give you a general idea if you need to add more disk space anywhere.  If you do, the instructions that come with the 11.1.1.5 VM Image deployment guide are great. Just make sure to use something like 10GB instead of the 1GB increase that they use in that documentation.
12. FTP or move from the VirtualBox shared folder, etc. the 5 large 11.1.1.6 zip files to the /bishiphome/downloads directory
13. Run the RCU utility to create the MDS and BIPlatform objects but be sure to use the same BIRCU prefix that you removed in an earlier step.  The original password for both users is Admin123
14. Unzip all of the 11.1.1.6 zip files to form the /bishiphome/downloads/bishiphome directory.
15. Delete the zip files to retain space on the system.
16. Then from /downloads/bishiphome/Disk1/ run the command to install OBI 11g 11.1.1.6. The install should go smoothly and without issue because the dependencies are already in place on the machine.  Run the Simple Install to be exactly the same as VM Image was initially developed (i.e.: everything on port 7001).  Run the Enterprise Install option to get OBI /analytics on port 9704, etc. During the install be sure to select the Fusion Middleware Home as /bishiphome/Middleware/
17. The install should finish and you’ve now got an 11.1.1.16 VM ready to go and integrate with Essbase, Times Ten, etc. that came with the original VM Image.  The only thing you’ve really interrupted at this point should be OBI (I’m still accessing the damage but I don’t see any yet; there shouldn’t be any).
18. Move any RPD, web catalog, etc. back to the new instance and that’s it.  You’ve now got a functioning copy of 11.1.1.6.

Resources:

• Semantic Versioning
• http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E21764_01/bi.1111/e10539/c6_deinstall.htm#CIHBIJFA