Release 5.5 of Oracle Analytics is now released. It’s now available both on the Oracle Cloud platform as “Oracle Analytics Cloud” and installable on your own hardware or other platforms as “Oracle Analytics Server”. This catches the on-premise version of Oracle Analytics (previously known as Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, OBIEE), up with the capabilities of Oracle Analytics Cloud. We have two upcoming free webinars to help you be up to date on new features.
This allows Oracle to coalesce its Analytics product line to three products: Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC), Oracle Analytics Server (OAS), and Oracle Analytics for Applications (OAX), as announced at Oracle Analytics Summit last summer. We can finally put to bed the old term OBIEE since OBIEE is replaced by OAS.
OAC New Features
There are several features in OAC 5.5 over OAC 5.4, including:
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New Spacer visualization for adding space between visualizations
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Totals before in Pivot table
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Explore as Project choice in classic Answers and Dashboards
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Assign map layer in data column
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Autofocus Map visualization property
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Oracle NetSuite Data Visualization Connection Type
There are other enhancements in OAC 5.5, but you can see there are several improvements, some large, and some merely incremental over OAS 5.4. We will cover these enhancements in our webcast “What’s New in Oracle Analytics 5.5”.
OAS New Features
The larger news is the release of Oracle Analytics Server. This can be thought of as equivalent to “OBIEE 12.2.1.5”, but It delivers all of the features contained in releases of OAC since OBIEE 12.2.1.4 was released in June 2018 (except for a couple features such as the Language Narrative Visualization and hosting of Day by Day apps). You can find details in our Oracle Analytics series of webinars on each of these releases: New Features in OAC 19.1.1, New Features in Oracle Analytics Cloud 105.2.0, New Features in Oracle Analytics Cloud 105.3.0, and New Features in Oracle Analytics Cloud 105.4.0, and the new features in Oracle Analytics 5.5 mentioned above. As you can see there’s a LOT that has been added since OBIEE 12.2.1.4, so this delivers a LOT of functionality. Probably the biggest news in OAS is the inclusion of the Data Visualization interface at no extra charge for customers that are current on their OBIEE support and upgrade from OBIEE to OAS. In effect, you are getting the DV interface for free. The capabilities are a mashup of the capabilities of classic OBIEE, the DV interface, and the new features introduced in Oracle Analytics Cloud, such as System Settings on the Console, where you can set values of nqsconfig.ini using a web user interface. We will cover this in our webcast “Migrating from OBIEE to Oracle Analytics Server (OAS).”
You can expect that OAS will be updated every year or 18 months or so to “catch up” to the capabilities introduced in subsequent OAC releases.
We look forward to being able to present a simplified message about Oracle’s Analytics platform, simply using simply referencing the product names OAC, OAS, and OAX.
We are already starting projects to help customers to upgrade from OBIEE to OAS so they can share the capabilities of DV with their users and the capabilities that have been introduced since OBIEE 12.2.1.4. Let us know if we can help you too.
You can find the documentation for the new release of OAS at https://docs.oracle.com/en/middleware/bi/analytics-server/index.html and an install image on http://edelivery.oracle.com by searching for Oracle Analytics Server.
