DECOMMISSIONING IN PRACTICE...Oracle Discoverer Decommissioning in Practice Things to Remember —...
Transcript of DECOMMISSIONING IN PRACTICE...Oracle Discoverer Decommissioning in Practice Things to Remember —...
ORACLE DISCOVERER DECOMMISSIONING IN PRACTICE
Eric McDonald. June 2019
Oracle Discoverer Decommissioning in Practice
— Let’s make this session as interactive as possible, so please ask questions during the
session
Some starter questions
— What stage are you at with Oracle decommissioning?
— It’s a problem, what do we do about it?
— We’re in the planning stage
— It’s in progress
— How many of you are looking at decommissioning in the next 12 months?
— What are your expectations of this session – what would you like to know?
— What’s your role – management / technical / other?
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Oracle Discoverer Decommissioning in Practice
Introduction
— Baillie Gifford
— My Role
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Baillie Gifford
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Baillie Gifford
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Baillie Gifford
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Oracle Discoverer Decommissioning in Practice
The Challenge
— Oracle Support for Discoverer expiring
— Upgrading to Windows 10
Our Starting Point
— Using Discoverer 6i client / server on Windows 7
— Existing base of around 100 users across 14 teams
— Approx. 400 workbooks
— Discoverer supporting key business processes
— Business Teams need to be able to do self-service reporting
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Oracle Discoverer Decommissioning in Practice
Our Environment
— Oracle 12c DB only - native Oracle logins (no EBS)
— Access managed by Oracle Roles
— EUL Business Areas – 10 out of 40 active
— EUL Fields – approx. 1,500 of 3,000 active
— Mainly using Oracle views and some tables as the interface
— Our data was mainly list-based
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Oracle Discoverer Decommissioning in Practice
Our Options
— Rebuild everything – estimated to take 24 months
— Try and get Discoverer working on Windows 10
— Upgrade to Oracle’s latest reporting option
Challenges
— Most reporting tools want to use some form of data cube
e.g. Tableau, Microsoft, Oracle
— We needed to maintain business as usual
— We needed to decommission in less than 12 months
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Oracle Discoverer Decommissioning in Practice
Splash BI
— Offered similar self-service functionality to Discoverer
— Familiar to Discoverer users
— …but, more user-friendly experience
— Excel add-in or browser-based
— Discoverer migration utility a key feature in reducing project time
— Migrates both workbooks and EUL
— Straightforward way of building list based reports, cross-tabs, and “just getting data into
Excel” !
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Demo
Oracle Discoverer Decommissioning in Practice
How we managed the project
— Migrated by Business Team
— Business Analysis
— Migration
— UAT
— Sign-Off
— Identified high-risk areas early
— Project duration 6 months
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Oracle Discoverer Decommissioning in Practice
What worked well?
— Similarity to Discoverer helped training
process
— 90+% of workbooks migrated easily
— Business Analysis identified people who no
longer needed the data or workbooks
— Very few post-migration support issues
— Splash BI Support Team issue resolution
What caused issues?
— Server setup required new Linux skills
— Missing joins as we only migrated some
fields
— Custom DB functions in Discoverer
— Age of existing Discoverer environment
meant some workbooks could not be
exported
— Business Team availability for UAT
— Removing our existing Discoverer
infrastructure
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Oracle Discoverer Decommissioning in Practice
Things to Remember
— Sit down with the business teams and work out what they need
— Have a clear plan agreed with the business teams
— Make sure communication is clear and timely
— Make sure the infrastructure is in place early
— Plan the new system architecture carefully
— Test and retest migrations and roll-out scenarios before business teams have access
— Make sure you have buy-in from business teams – do demos!
— Make sure training is in place before, during, and after migration
— Make sure that support handover is planned
— Talk to the business teams at every stage
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Questions?