Oracle BI Intelligence 11g ( OBI 11g) Launch 07/07/2010

I took time to-day to attend the launch event of much awaited OBIEE11g. After seeing the demos and presentations it is worth waiting for.

The OBI 11g release is total revamp of what we see currently on 10g release. For me, the most important bits are -

Server Adminstation
====================

- The OBI Server can be managed through the Enterprise Manager, systems management & deployment are much easier.
- Deployment to Production can be achieved from the Admin Tool ( GUI), I heard of version controlling as well. But not sure.
- Allows incremental deployments to Repository
- When OBI is installed it comes with preconfigured Scheduler (no need to do additional configurations as currently in 10g).
- Upgrade utility from 10g to 11g (Yes, really!!)
- Installation is much easier using OUI.
- Supports Relational modelling as well.

and much more.

Presentation Services
=====================

wow! where to start. the Dashboards are really Interactive, it really means.
- The Pivot Tables can be easily altered - drag and drops (like discoverer) to alter the view of the Pivot tables on the fly (not through design layer as in 10g)
- drilling ups and downs in the same page, similar to Discoverer
- The bit that stands out is " Chart Sliding" which provides a slider for Dashboard prompt values, and the user can travel through each value of the prompt and the chart changes accordingly. That was really cool.
- Chart Zooming (In / Out)
- Global filters, filters can be applied dynamically and if want for all the charts / reports on a single dashboard page.

Most of the interactive features are like as in Discoverer 10g, but the comparison just ends there, OBI 11g offers much more.

- ScoreCarding is really great! and is integrated into OBI.

Look & Feel
===========
- Look and feel is really good, much revamped and very intuitive.
- Search facility in the BI Catalog (Yes! it is).
- the presentation is much better



BI Publisher
============
The current version of BIP put me off, as the templates need to be designed from MS Office products and then use it in BIP etc etc.....

The new version allows to design the templates from BIP itself. I thought that is quite cool.

All in all, with the 11g release most of the bits can be achieved from single unitifed interface, rather than jumping back and forth between various interfaces.

Personally I can not wait to get my hands on the new version.