OBIEE 11G Architecture

Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Release 1 Architecture

The Oracle BI Server provides native, federated access to data sources, together with security, calculations, and data navigation. The Oracle BI Presentation Server connects to the BI Server to obtain data, which it presents to users in the form of analyses, reports, and dashboards.

In addition to these two servers, there are three other servers that work with them to provide core Oracle Business Intelligence functionality:

   Oracle BI Cluster Controller   This server provides a central point of access for the Oracle BI Presentation Server when two or more BI Servers are working together in a cluster, together with load-balancing, failover, and other cluster services.

   Oracle BI Java Host   This server works alongside the BI Presentation Server to provide connectivity to Java tasks and the Java-based Oracle BI Publisher, as well as to support chart generation.

   Oracle BI Scheduler   This server is used to schedule and automate the production and distribution of analyses, as well as to automate workflow tasks based around business intelligence functionality.

These three servers, together with the Oracle BI Server and the Oracle BI Presentation Server, are known in Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Release 1 terminology as system components, and they run as services and servers directly on the host platform. They are operating system executables written in C-based languages.

To create the link between an end user’s web browser and the dashboards, analyses, and reports provided by the Oracle BI Presentation Server, a Java application called the Oracle BI Analytics Plug-In runs in a Java application server and routes incoming requests through to the BI Presentation Server. (Currently, only Oracle WebLogic Server is supported, but later releases of Oracle Business Intelligence should support other application servers.) A simplified schematic of the Oracle Business Intelligence 11g system components, together with the Oracle BI Plug-In, is shown in below

Oracle Business Intelligence system components schematic

 

This basic, internal architecture has stayed consistent since the days of nQuire and Siebel Analytics and is still at the core of the 11g Release of Oracle Business Intelligence. It, together with two additional Java server applications for publishing reports and connecting to Microsoft office, is largely the architecture of the 10g release of Oracle Business Intelligence and would run fairly comfortably on a smaller server, desktop computer, or laptop. Because the product has been adopted within Oracle Corporation as their strategic business intelligence platform and, in particular, because it has been integrated over time into their wider Oracle Fusion Middleware platform due to customer requirements for BI to integrate into wider business processes and applications, these core components have been built on and enhanced with additional Java components to form the more complete architecture used in the 11g Release 1 version.

 

Oracle Business Intelligence 11g and Oracle Fusion Middleware

While the core components within Oracle Business Intelligence remain the Oracle BI Server and Oracle BI Presentation Server, supported by the Oracle BI Scheduler, Oracle Java Host, and Oracle BI Cluster Controller, these have been supplemented in the 11g Release 1 release by Java-based Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies based around the Oracle WebLogic Server application server (with plans to extend this to other non-WebLogic application servers in future releases). While the previous, 10g release of Oracle Business Intelligence made limited use of application server technology to, for example, host the Oracle BI Plug-In and Java-based applications such as Oracle BI Publisher and Oracle BI Office, the 11g release of Oracle Business Intelligence leverages Fusion Middleware and WebLogic technologies in areas such as the following:

   Security and authentication, which are now delegated to Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, with users and groups now held, by default, in the WebLogic Server LDAP directory rather than the Oracle BI Repository

   Systems administration, now centralized using Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control

   Connectivity to outside applications and processes through the Java-based Action Service, with security and credentials handled via Fusion Middleware’s credential and policy stores

   Administration scripting using the Oracle WebLogic Scripting Tool and JMX MBeans (Java managed beans that provide the core administration functionality behind Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control)

   Process management of the system components (BI Server, BI Presentation Server, and so on) through the Oracle Process Manager and Notification Server

   High availability through clustering of WebLogic Managed Servers within a WebLogic domain

Below architecture diagram shows the logical architecture for Oracle Business Intelligence 11g Release 1, which together is called an Oracle BI domain.

The Oracle Business Intelligence 11g logical architecture

This logical architecture is made up of a number of components:

   Oracle BI domain   The complete set of Java and non-Java components that make up a single Oracle Business Intelligence environment

   WebLogic domain   Houses the Java components within the architecture

   WebLogic Server Admin Server   A JEE container (server) that contains a dedicated Java Virtual Machine used for monitoring and managing the system

   WebLogic Server Managed Server   Another dedicated JEE container that, in this case, is used to house the Java applications used by Oracle Business Intelligence

   Java components   Java applications such as the Oracle BI Analytics Plug-In, Oracle BI Publisher, the Action Service, and Oracle BI Office that work alongside the traditional system components described previously

   System components   The term now used for the original BI Server, BI Presentation Server, and other servers used in the core Oracle Business Intelligence architecture

   WebLogic Server Administration Console   An application that runs in the Admin Server and is used for controlling WebLogic Server

   Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control   For managing the Oracle Business Intelligence system across a single or multiple cluster nodes

   Supporting database schemas   Created using the Oracle Fusion Middleware Repository Creation Utility, which contains relational tables used for storing additional Oracle Business Intelligence metadata (BIPLATFORM) and metadata used by Oracle Fusion Middleware’s Metadata Services (MDS)