Introduction
A common use case for Incorta customers is the need to replicate an OBIEE report/dashboard with an Incorta dashboard or even migrate a number of OBIEE dashboards. This article provides several techniques that will make this task easier for you and that will optimize your results.
What you should know before reading this article
We recommend that you be familiar with these Incorta concepts before exploring this topic further.
Applies to
These concepts apply to all releases of Incorta.
Let’s Go
Before you dive into the concepts below, it is important to understand that Incorta offers a new way of doing things that helps you avoid jumping through most of the hoops you have to jump through with more traditional data warehouse tools. Taking the time to familiarize yourself with Incorta concepts will save you time in the long run. Incorta’s Learn offerings are well worth the time and you should take at least the Essentials course before doing too much hands-on work.
Start with Incorta Data Apps
Before you can build any dashboards in Incorta, you need to bring the data required to support those dashboards into Incorta. If you have already built your own custom schemas with the data you need, then you should work with those but if not, Incorta has data applications for Oracle that provide the physical schemas, business schemas and even dashboards that will get you started. These can be deployed to your cluster from the Marketplace tab (available on Incorta Cloud and On-premises starting with 5.2) and loaded with your own data very quickly. This gives you a head start on any data modeling that you might need to do and you may even find that some of the provided dashboard content meets your needs without having to do extensive work to replicate your OBIEE reports.
Identify and Prioritize OBIEE Dashboards to be Migrated
Identifying and grouping the OBIEE dashboard content you want to migrate into Incorta is a good idea. A module-by-module grouping can be effective as the data modeling on the Incorta side that supports the reporting will be contained. Consider using OBIEE Usage Tracking to help you identify and prioritize which dashboards to target for migration to Incorta. This tool gives you information about the frequency that users access dashboards and the response times of dashboards. Dashboards that are accessed frequently and are slow are great candidates to move into Incorta on high priority.
There are ways to generate the SQL underlying your OBIEE dashboards from the logs. Having that SQL available will help you as you build your data model in Incorta. The Incorta Data Apps may cover most of what you need but having the specifics of the tables and columns in the dashboards you intend to build in Incorta will make it easier to fill any remaining gaps.
Model Business Schemas on OBIEE Subjects Areas
Incorta has a different way of doing things to give you the best results but you can translate much of the way that things are organized in OBIEE into concepts that you use in Incorta. One of the important concepts in Incorta is the Business Schema which allows you to define a layer of abstraction on top of Incorta’s physical schemas for business users. Within a Business Schema, you can define multiple Business Views which contain meaningful columns, appropriately named, to power users who can use them to build dashboards.
A way to simplify the translation of OBIEE dashboards is to model your Incorta Business Schemas on the OBIEE Subject Areas that you use. One Business Schema can correspond to one Subject Area and you can build a Business View to correspond to each folder within the Subject Area. This will give your report/dashboard builders a familiar set of data elements to work with.
Combine Multiple OBIEE Reports in a Single Incorta Dashboard
If your OBIEE dashboards consist of a single report, then you can take advantage of the migration to Incorta to enhance the experience for your users. In Incorta, you can put multiple reports, or Insights in Incorta parlance, onto a single dashboard tab and create multiple tabs per dashboard. This allows users to have a lot more information together in one place which is generally more efficient for them.
You have the option to strictly replicate the reports that you use in OBIEE and just lay multiple of them out on your Incorta dashboard, but you also have the ability to get creative about the way that you present your content. Different visualizations can help you draw users’ attention to what is most important and can help them get all the information they need to be more productive. It is worth understanding Dashboard Design Principles and Best Practices as you think about how you design your Incorta dashboards. Look at the dashboards that come out of the box with any Data Apps that you have installed as they provide good models for how you might build your own.
Set up Security
You can emulate roles as defined in OBIEE in Incorta to manage access to the dashboard content that you create. You should also consider your object sharing strategy for power users versus regular dashboard consumers.
It is possible to emulate any row-level security rules that you have established in OBIEE in Incorta and you will want to do this so that your users see the expected data sets and not more or less than they should. This Data Security article explains how to implement your data security rules using session variables.
Tune Your Dashboards
Your Incorta users look to Incorta to provide outstanding performance and you should make sure that your dashboards are optimized to perform at their best. There are multiple ways to look at and affect performance in Incorta but a good place to start is by reviewing the Dashboard Design for Performance article that is available on the Incorta Community. You may also want to look at the Front-End Tuning section of the Performance Tuning Guide.
Schedule Incorta Dashboards for Delivery
If your users are used to receiving reports in their email boxes, make sure to do the same thing in Incorta. See our documentation for how to schedule dashboards for delivery via email.
Related Material
- Dashboard Design Principles
- Dashboard Design Best Practices
- Data Security using Session Variables
- Dashboard Design for Performance
- Performance Tuning Guide
- Schedule Dashboards
- Manage OBIEE Session Logs
- Managing and Securing Content
- Sharing Incorta Objects
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