Sample App for 11.1.1.5.0 Now Available

 The latest version of the Sample App, for Oracle BI 11g 11.1.1.5.0, was made available for download from OTN today. As the thousands of people who have downloaded and used the Sample App would know, it is a great way to get introduced to Oracle BI and to see so many of its features in action. It also serves as an excellent tutorial of sorts, since in so many  areas the Sample App makes the fullest use of the product's amazing capabilities. Since some of these features, expectedly, require a person to possess a fair amount of relevant BI and Oracle BI skills, the available examples in the Sample App serve as a useful how-to, thus saving time for the person implementing or using the product.

OBIEE Samples - the landing page for the Sample App on the Oracle Technology Network (aka OTN)

V107 - the latest version of the Sample App, for 11.1.1.5.0

Oracle Business Intelligence (11.1.1.x) Downloads
And the links for the Release Notes, Documentation Library, and Certification Information.
The tweets from the Oracle_BIEE Twitter handle:

As a disclaimer, please do take note of the following:
Disclaimer: The SampleApp contents and its code are distributed free for demonstrative purposes only. It is neither maintained nor supported by Oracle as a licensed product.

New Oracle University Course: BI 11g Sys Admin

Oracle University has published a new online Oracle BI EE 11g course, "Oracle BI 11g R1: Introduction to System Administration - Online Course". It is in a self-study format, and is intended to allow users to learn how to manage Oracle BI 11g:

• Fusion Middleware (FMW) Control to monitor manage, and configure Oracle BI system components
• Oracle WebLogic Server (WLS) Administration Console to monitor and manage Oracle BI JEE Java components
• Oracle Process Manager and Notification Server (OPMN) Tool to manage Oracle BI system components
• Oracle BI Administration Tool to perform administrative tasks.

The course topics are:

• Oracle BI System Administration Overview
• Managing Oracle Business Intelligence
• Configuring the Oracle BI SystemStarting and Stopping Oracle BI
• Scaling an Oracle BI Deployment
• Deploying Oracle BI For High Availability
• Managing Performance Tuning and Query Caching
• Diagnosing and Resolving Issues in Oracle BI
• Managing Usage Tracking
• Oracle BI Security

Learning more about BI Publisher - OBE

If you want to quickly learn about or get a feel for how BI Publisher works, and this may be especially the case for those who come more from the Discoverer side of things, I would suggest you spend a few minutes going over the excellent OBEs (Oracle By Example) series available on BI Publisher on OTN.

The Oracle by Example (OBE) series provides hands-on, step-by-step instructions on how to implement various technology solutions to business problems. OBE solutions are built for practical real-world situations, allowing you to gain valuable hands-on experience as well as use the presented solutions as the foundation for production implementation, dramatically reducing time to deployment.

The BI Publisher OBE page lists these OBEs:

• Getting Started with Oracle BI Publisher
• Integrating Oracle BI Publisher with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition
• Exploring Advanced Features of Oracle BI Publisher

While these OBEs are based on the 10.1.3.2 release of BI Publisher, it doesn't matter for the most part - there are some new features in BI Publisher that you could read up on separately; enhancements to the Template Builder, support for digital signing of PDF files, support for Flash as a report format, etc...

Also, you can probably skip the second OBE for now, but it is still useful as it gives a glimpse into how you could integrate Discoverer content with a BI Enterprise Edition Dashboard page.

Online tutorial for BI EE

Ok, so someone is going to take me to task for calling it a 'tutorial' because the correct term to use is "OBE" - Oracle By Example. To quote from the Oracle documentation site, "Oracle by Example (OBE) tutorials provide hands-on, step-by-step instructions on how to implement various technology solutions to business problems. OBE solutions are built for practical real-world situations, allowing you to gain valuable hands-on experience as well as use the presented solutions as the foundation for production implementation, dramatically reducing time to deployment."
There are two OBEs for the BI EE 10.1.3 release that are immediately available, while more are in the works.

1. Creating Interactive Dashboards and Using Oracle Business Intelligence Answers
2. Creating a Repository Using the Oracle Business Intelligence Administration Tool

For those of you who look at the URL closely, especially the OBE on Answers, it shall tell you a little bit of the lingering traces of the product's lineage :-)