Jimmy Buffett once said “Is it ignorance and apathy? … I don’t know, and I don’t care.”  When it comes to delivering insights to users and they are asked whether it should be on premise or in the cloud, business users have the same reaction.

Oracle BI Applications (OBIA) let organizations deploy analytics both in the cloud, on premise, or a hybrid model.  Because of how Oracle built its database and pieces of middleware, IT departments have many options how they deploy BI Applications.  At the root, OBIA are three sets of metadata.  Oracle has put tons of intellectual property into these sets of metadata, but they are “just” three sets of metadata

• The ODI and Golden Gate scripts. I could write many pages about these, but they are metadata used to drive ODI and Golden Gate scripts.  In fact, Simon Miller and I wrote many pages about ETL scripts in our book on Oracle BI Applications.
• The DDL and other database metadata. Buried into these are the schema of the data warehouse and the indices used to make them perform well.
• The RPD and webcat. These contain the prebuilt hierarchies, the rest of the metrics that are not calculated in the ETL scripts, and the off-the-shelf reports and dashboards.

Given that the OBIA are just three sets of metadata, where cloud and on-premise products use the same metadata, people have many options where to deploy these. 

Here are some of them:

• Deploy everything on premise. People think this is the only way one can deploy Oracle BI Applications.  It’s not true.
• Deploy the BI in Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) and everything else on premise. One can connect OAC to an on-premise database either with the Remote Data Connector (RDC) or a VPN connection.
• Deploy BI in OAC, the database in Database Cloud Service (DB CS), and everything else on premise. One can set the target database for on-premise ODI to be a cloud database.  Use VPN to connect ODI to DB CS.  OBIA needs, at a minimum, DB CS Enterprise Edition High Performance, but other than that, go wild.
• Deploy the ERP or HCM system in the cloud and everything else on premise. One can use view objects to pull data into ODI and from there to a conventional data warehouse.

Until OBIA runs with ODI 12c, one cannot use ODI CS.  ODI on-premise is the only option.  Other than that, the restrictions of what runs in what layer should be driven by cost and security concerns.  By security concerns, I do not mean the security of the Oracle Public Cloud, I mean ensuring that whatever holes you need to punch in your firewalls meet your information security standards.

We at HEXstream can help you sort through these options as you move your OBIA to the cloud in a manner consistent with your organization’s needs.  Call us.