OBIEE 11g hasn't treated me well!

Every blogger in OBIEE area has posted about the installation steps and quite a few posts on new features, configuration, architecture etc. after the much anticipated and publicized OBIEE 11g launch in July. I have been thinking about getting it installed and review it myself for quiet a bit of time and it took a lot of effort due to poor planning. Anyway, I am here to put all that effort here so that everybody can learn from it.

My system configuration - Dell Studio 1558, Intel i3 CPU M330 @ 2.13 GHz, 4 GB RAM, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Attempt 1

Couple of weeks back, I was talking to a colleague of mine and heard that any program can be run as if the OS is XP Professional 32-bit by simply changing the compatibility mode in setup.exe properties. I installed OBIEE 11g R2 Database using compatibility mode and was able to connect to it just fine. I also ran rcu and it just ran great. OBIEE 11.1.1.3 installer wasn't doing anything (no changes in log) for hours at step 11 of 12. I checked couple of OTN posts and it became clear that Windows 7 wasn't an option.

Attempt 2

Then came this noble idea of VMware and thought that RedHat would be fun to install. I used to have Windows and Mandrive on my previous Dell Inspiron 700m. Also, RedHat is becoming popular at work and that also contributed for the decision to install RHEL.OBIEE 11g R2 database, RCU and OBIEE 11g got installed successfully except for few rpms missing in RHEL. It was straight forward except few minor issues. But, Administration Tool isn't available on RHEL. So, checked the platform compatibility xls and found that client is available only for Windows based OS.

Attempt 3

My elder brother uses my 6 year old Dell 700m (1.2 GB RAM, XP Professional), which I used over the weekend to install the OBIEE 11g software. The whole install took the whole Saturday night and the monitor went off in the morning before the installation was fully done and the monitor is not powering on anymore. I tested the installation successfully but I took off one entertainment option for my brother.

Attempt 4

I removed RHEL Virtual machine and installed XP Professional with 2 GB memory, 2 processors and 60 GB Hard Disk dedicated for VM. I got all of it installed on the VM successfully and trying to dig through to make sense of everything. It took about 6-7 hours for the installation, which itself is a lot of time.

Here are my first set of comments(not really complaints).

• OBIEE 11g install is a huge footprint. 11-12 weeks were considered enough for simpler OOB Analytics applications such as Service and Order Management where as with this kind of platform install, that kind of timelines cannot be met.
• Documentation is about 1 GB, which is just too much to even carry around.
• Limited Platforms in Release 1 is another thing. When you cannot have software for all platforms, you always get a feeling that it is not stable. Next release is supposed to address this and the next release is expected in early 2011.
• Only application server available to support OBIEE is Weblogic, which is a huge reason for not many upgrades planned.
• Installer cannot install client tools alone. I am surprised how Oracle could let this out without addressing this.
• OBI Presentation looks really great and I liked the way the samples are presented. Users will have to be trained all over on 11g due to significant differences and more complex presentation may loose its USP.

At a time when IT budgets are tightly managed, investments in technology upgrades will be  evaluated  more from value perspective. But, as economy picks up pace heading north east, upgrades will get kick started . I expect next year to be huge in terms of upgrades, trainings and lot more projects in OBIEE 11g. So, it is better to be ahead of the curve for everybody than fall behind.

I would like to hear from people about experiences with RPD and Catalog upgrade. I will certainly take sometime in the next few weeks on the upgrade part and post my observations.