Oracle BICS - Oracle BIEE + Cloud - A solution built on Cloud keeping only Oracle BIEE in mind
December 07, 2017
Oracle BICS - Oracle BIEE + Cloud - A solution built on Cloud keeping only Oracle BIEE in mind
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service
We recently migrated our internal reporting services from on-premise OBIEE to BICS. We want to use our internal project as a reference to our customers. BICS can address all the problems that a traditional OBIEE can address, with some limitations on the data model. One has to choose the right solution for data model development and this is the key to success.
- Oracle BICS is a first debut of Oracle BI in cloud. BICS is designed to provide lot of flexibility. BICS provides three solutions - 1. Completely deploy all BI services (data model, Catalog and DB) in Cloud using BICS. 2. Deploy Catalog in Cloud. RPD and DB reside on-premise (Hybrid Solution) 3. Deploy Data Model and Catalog in Cloud. DB stays on-premise (Hybrid Solution). No other cloud offers this flexibility. BICS design is centered on BIEE and advantages of Cloud.
- Oracle BICS provides industry standard security. For on-premise applications, SSL has to be implemented manually but now, it is part of the BICS package. We get SSL encrypted. When implementing BICS Hybrid Solution with DB on-premise, Oracle BICS provides Public Key to deploy in on-premise. BICS, having the private key, is the only authorized tool to access this database and run queries. No spoofing possible.
- Oracle BICS provides flexibility to Developers. If the data model is simple, they can do the development over the BICS cloud. If the data model is complex and need advance features of RPD, they can do development on-premise using RPD tool and can deploy this RPD to BICS. BICS will then convert that RPD to data model.
- Oracle BICS is a Cloud Solution. It is very important for many organizations on the location of the data center. It should be, at least, in the same region as the Organization is. This is important for performance as well. Oracle BICS has multiple locations across the world and especially, multiple locations with in the USA. These locations grow based on demand.
- In an implementation where developers do their work on-premise RPD and deploy it to BICS, Oracle BICS will convert that RPD to data model before deployment. Developers can take a snapshot of that data model and download that data model. But, can't convert / extract that data model to RPD. This is one limitation that I would like to see some improvement.
- Oracle BICS has no BI Publisher integration. BI Publisher is used by many customers and is one of the reasons that they are delaying BICS migration.
- Oracle BICS lacks iBots (Scheduler). This is one of the most used feature in traditional OBIEE, where we can schedule reports to run and email to us / set of users. Lack of this feature is a major drawback of BICS.
- Oracle BICS lacks the forward migration path, as of today. If we want to migrate to OAC (Oracle Analytics Cloud), there is no way to extract RPD out of data model. We may have to develop RPD from scratch, if we used BICS solution to develop data model. Oracle is planning to release a fix for this in the future.
The major advantage of Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service comes in when a user has an Oracle centric development environment. As mentioned earlier, Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service is built keeping OBIEE and Cloud in mind. This is purely to provide Cloud advantages to their traditional on-premise Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition customers. As mentioned earlier, this tool provides 2 different hybrid solutions and one full cloud solution. Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service does not have a path for other tools to migrate. Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Service has a Visual Analyzer which is a game changer. This provides all the Visualizations that all other tools combined can provide.