We’ve been hearing about OBIEE 11.1.1.5 for a while now. It’s finally being released. This is the first release after 11.1.1.3, the initial release of OBIEE 11g. So for those that were waiting for the “first patch release” of 11g, it’s now safe to get into the water.
The key items in this release from our standpoint are:
- Full support for the iPad
- Full support for OLAP sources including Essbase and Oracle OLAP
- Reduced memory requirements for Weblogic
- 64-bit BI Admin Tool
Indeed, on the first item, we were involved in a presentation that showed this in Chicago in March, 2011. It is very cool. It’s running full OBIEE on your iPad or iPhone. Hmmm…I seem to recall that it requires at least the iPhone 3GS. I’ll have to get that validated. It may be time for a new phone!
On the second item, if this does what we have been told, this makes it VERY simple to expose Oracle OLAP cubes to OBIEE. Simply point to the OLAP cube as a source in BI Admin tool and you can query it. No more having to use the AWM plugin to look at OLAP data.
On the third item, Weblogic takes a lot of memory. For all practical purposes, this meant that OBIEE required a 64-bit OS to address more than 4GB of memory. In this version is supposed to be a reduced memory footprint of Weblogic. We will be testing to see how skinnied dow this is.
Finally, we have wanted to have a 64-bit admin tool for quite some time. I have 64-bit Windows 7 on my laptop. As a result, every time I wanted to even look at the Admin tool, I had to remote desktop or start up a virtual machine. I’m looking forward to having a 64-bit Admin tool at my disposal. Hmmm…I seem to recall that there is no separate install planned for that. How long until someone figures out how to rip the 64-bit Admin tool out of a full installation and make it run standalone?
We’ll let you know when we have validated the features and keep you posted on our testing. Thanks, Abhinav for posting your blog entry! The software should appear shortly here.
Here’s a quick follow-up. The release must be imminent as I saw earlier today pieces of 11.1.1.5 appear, but some links were broken. Now when I check, the release is not there. So they must be in the middle of updating the HTML right now.
Yet another followup:…
After some initial tries, Oracle seems to have 11.1.1.5 actually linked properly. The main download page for OBIEE off of OTN (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bi-enterprise-edition/downloads/bus-intelligence-11g-165436.html) now references 11.1.1.5. So it appears they have it out there.
We can now start looking at “what’s new”. The documentation appears to have the “what’s new” interspersed with other content. There are some significant changes. There is a whole new section on “Working with OLAP Data Sources”. Indeed, you appear to be able to simply import OLAP cubes by simply pointing to them. More on this as we have a chance to try it ourselves.
Oh, one other interesting “feature”: in the Admin tool, the crows feet no longer indicate the “many” side of a join. Instead, there is an arrow that points from the many to the one. As a result, now we have to define our joins the other way, from the many to the one. Hmmm…let’s see if I can get used to doing that!
