Pages

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

The RCU And What It Means For You

I could not resist it - the feeble attempt at creating this rhythmic effect with the title.

If you need to install OBIEE 11g (properly known as Oracle® Fusion Middleware Oracle Business Intelligence), you need to take a look at the Oracle® Fusion Middleware Quick Installation Guide for Oracle Business Intelligence
Also see Oracle® Fusion Middleware Repository Creation Utility User's Guide
RCU User's Guide

Oracle BI EE Quick Install Guide
There are basically three steps involved to installing Oracle BI EE 11g.
The first is the Oracle Database part. You have to have a supported Oracle Database. I am going to skip over that step, since this post is about the RCU.
The second part is the RCU. You need to use the RCU to install schemas that Oracle BI EE requires. And that's what I am going to talk about.

The RCU is simply the "Repository Creation Utility". Simply put, the RCU lets you install certain schemas in a database that are required by Fusion Middleware products like Oracle BI EE. These schemas can be installed onto any certified version of database like Oracle Database, IBM DB2, or Microsoft SQL Server. There are schemas that are required by the core components of Oracle Fusion Middleware, while there are schemas that Oracle BI EE requires, like for the Scheduler, for BI Publisher, for the new Scorecard product.

You can download the installable for RCU from OTN, at the Oracle Business Intelligence (11.1.1.x) Downloads page. The Windows 32-bit downloadable is available at Microsoft Windows (32-bit), while the Linux x86 32-bit downloadable is available at Linux x86 (32-bit)



Once you have downloaded the RCU, unzip it to a folder.

Navigate to the rcuHome\BIN folder and run the rcu.bat file (on Windows - I am running this example on a Windows 32-bit machine).
The rcu.bat file to be run on a Windows machine

Select "Create" from the option radio-button, and click "Next".
Here you can select an Oracle Database, or click the dropdown to select another database. I will use Oracle Database, obviously.

RCU Welcome Screen

Select the "Create" option

Enter the details where your Oracle Database is running

While there are strategies you may want to employ when defining a prefix to your RCU schemas, since I am installing these schemas for my use on my laptop, I am going to keep things simple, and use a prefix of "RCUOBIEE". If I check the "Oracle Business Intelligence" box, you will notice that any dependent schemas also get checked. Which is neat.You will also notice that a name is suffixed to each of the schemas that are going to be created. Therefore, OBIEE gets a suffix of BIPLATFORM. This is because the Oracle BI EE suite is referred to as the "platform", sometimes, in discussions where we want to distinguish it from, say, "BI Applications". We call everything "BI", but this distinction is useful because we use the Oracle BI EE suite to build other products like Oracle BI Applications. The "platform" is also used by other groups inside Oracle to build custom analytics offerings. Anyway - trivia I thought I should share.

The remainder of the steps are fairly straightforward and self-explanatory. You click "OK' where there is an "OK" button, and "Next" where there is a "Next" button, "Create" where there is a "Create" button, and "Close" when you finally see a "Close" button. The whole process should not take more than a couple of minutes. Say 5 minutes, from start to finish.

Select a prefix for the RCU schemas

RCU Creation Process

Selecting a password for the RCU schemas

The default and TEMP tablespaces for the schemas



About the start the actual schema creation process.

RCU has completed creating the schemas

And that, my friends, is a wrap, as far as the RCU story goes.

Sort of a post-wrap exercise may be, for those so interested, to launch Oracle SQL Developer, and peek a look at what sort of tables are created by the RCU. Your choice really.
If you choose to do so, this is what you would see.
Schemas created by RCU for OBIEE
 The "ANNOT*" tables are used by the Scorecard product.
"QRTZ*" tables are used by BI Publisher, "CALC*", "HSS*" by Essbase and Oracle Hyperion products.
Tables in the RCUOBIEE_BIPLATFORM schema