Tuesday I went to a session regarding migrating Oracle Discoverer to OBIEE which was a very interesting resume on do’s and don’ts when migrating.
First of all only metadata is migrated, not the reports itself. When you think about that is a logical approach as well because you don’t want all your front-end reports and logic to be delivered in OBI. OBI has a lot of more features which you wouldn’t be using when migrating as well metadata as reports.
Tip: Use different rpd-files when you have loads of data to resolve performance issues because BI Server reads through the whole rpd-file when starting up.
How to start migrating:
- Export ‘End User Layer’ in discoverer to a .eex file
- The migrate tool itseld is a windows based tool which you can use command-line to migrate the .eex file to an .rpd file. You can change the properties of the migration tool in the MigrationConfig.properties file.
- Copy the .rpd-file to your BI Server/Repository folder
- Define which .rpd-file to start-up with in the NQSConfig.INI file
- Update the .rpd-file online
- Login to your OBI-environment and open up the Answers-tab to look through the Subject Area and data that has been created using the .rpd file. From now on you start creating your own reports as a business user.
What isn’t migrated when opening the rpd-file in OBI EE:
- You have to reestablish the connection to your database
- You have to define a password for your Administrator user otherwise your BI Server won’t come up on your linux environment. This is a very important tip: because it takes a while to find out which error occured when you’ve migrated your discoverer metadata to an .rpd file and your BI Server crashes.
