Earlier this week, Oracle upgraded its BI Cloud Service platform as well as DataSync (now version 2.2) for cloud integrations. With those 2 upgrades come great benefits if you have any of the following and looking to do consolidated business analytics from multiple source systems and allow for cross-functional insights:
- Salesforce: There is no need anymore to worry about using REST APIs and code your integrations out of Salesforce. With the new Oracle JDBC adapter for Salesforce, automating data loads from Salesforce into Oracle BI Cloud is seamless and metadata-driven. And its all included in the BICS subscription with no need for third party drivers.
- Oracle Service Cloud (RighNow)
- Big Data technologies such as Greenplum, Hive, and Impala
- Amazon Redshift
- IBM Informix
- MongoDB
- PostgreSQL
- Sybase
The way these integrations work is through pre-installed JDBC libraries that come with the latest release of DataSync V2.2. When creating a connection to a data source, the drop down for the source type now includes a Generic JDBC type which leverages these libraries. All you do really is enter the url of your source application (such as Salesforce, RightNow, etc…) and the proper login to connect.
After the connection is created, there are usually 3 ways to export data from the source system.
- Metadata-driven: So for example, if you are connecting to Salesforce, the wizard discovers what objects are available from the Salesforce application and exposes them in the DataSync project window to select from.
- Report Based: If the source system supports reporting, such as RightNow, you may connect to an existing report in the source application to use as a data source.
- Custom Query: This is where you can create your own query and join more than one object to source data. For instance, if loading data from RightNow, you can use ROSQL to define your data extraction logic.
All these enhanced integrations for BICS come as an addition to the existing capability for tight integration with all Oracle Transaction BI Applications (OTBI) both on-prem and in Cloud.
– Oracle Financials Cloud
– Oracle HCM Cloud
– Oracle Procurement Cloud
– Oracle Project Management Cloud
– Oracle Sales Cloud
– Oracle Supply Chain Management Cloud
And for the sake of completeness, I am listing below the databases that are supported with BICS:
- Oracle
- Microsoft SQL Server
- DB2
- Teradata
- MySQL
- Oracle TimesTen
- Other sources that support JDBC
Ofcourse, loading data from files (such as CSV or Excel) also works great with BICS.
For more information on these new features, refer to What’s New.
For information on integrating BICS with Oracle Service Cloud (RightNow), refer to this document.
For information on connecting BICS to Saleforce, refer to this document.
It seems that these sources are “available” to be sources to move data to the Schema as a Service that comes with BICS…. but what about using these data sources directly (either direct connection in BICS or through the on-prem admin tool (which could go through a ‘lift and shift’ onto BICS))?
Doesn’t seem like BICS, in its current state, supports direct connection to these data sources from the New Data Source wizard. The current options I see are from File, Oracle Application and Oracle Database. However, in Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC), which is an enhanced release of BICS, you have a lot more options and so you are able to directly connect to such data sources using the Create New Connection under Data Sources.
If you are thinking of Lift and Shift of the admin tool repository, you will have to get the corresponding source system driver and setup the OBIEE RPD connection pool to use that driver. However, BICS is pretty restricted in what you can setup on the server so even though you upload the rpd, you won’t be able to setup the driver you need there. With OAC you have more flexibility on doing SSH and configuring the server so theoretically the corresponding source system driver may be setup there to go with the RPD.