FEATURES Spring 2019 TAKING OFF

TAKING OFF TO ORACLE ANALYTICS CLOUD

RAGHAV VENKAT, CITY OF LAS VEGAS

“Cutting edge cloud applications: enabling agility, mobility and innovation.”

Considerations, the Experience and Lessons Learned

FEATURES Spring 2019

15 OAUG INSIGHT MAGAZINE OAUG.ORG

Embrace the FutureAnalytics is becoming more vital for every organization in today’s technology landscape. In fact, cloud computing is the new normal! It has evolved as the next big, bright and excellent idea. There are several quantifiable benefits, such as greater agility, lower cost and better utilization of skills; more reliable infrastructure; and elasticity, that have encouraged several businesses to consider it as the next best improvement. In this article, I offer real-life experiences and some lessons learned in planning and executing a transition from on-premises analytics applications to Oracle Analytics Cloud.

Don’t Get Caught up in the Hype Oracle Analytics Cloud is a great option for many, but not all, enterprises. A prerequisite for successful migration is a cloud assessment. A detailed analysis on several facets of the cloud product, such as financials, security and compliance, and technical, should be included. A general total cost of ownership (TCO) calculation and a plan to measure success should be the outcome of this exercise. This is a great time to make the case for or against moving to the cloud, separating truth from noise. Specifically, customers with Oracle BI Applications might have to spend some extra effort when assessing the journey to cloud.

Why Oracle Analytics Cloud?Currently, the City of Las Vegas uses the Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) on-premises solution for analytics delivery. Though it is a stable and reliable solution, OBIEE has shortcomings related to helping us achieve some of our goals, such as advanced analytics, better user interaction, mobility and availability.

Additionally, our IT leadership team wanted more innovation in analytics delivery. Here are some key features that motivated us to look at upgrading our analytics platform:

1. Time: Maintaining infrastructures, servers, patching and upgrading requires a significant time investment, and we were looking for efficiency in this area.

2. Access anything-anywhere: In the current landscape where data-assisted decision making is a high priority, access to dashboards and data is becoming so important that users are requesting 24/7 access to analytic systems from anywhere (on or outside) our internal network. Cloud-based analytic platforms directly address this by providing secure access to users’ data from anywhere there is internet and also in various modes of operation.

3. Data savvy: Business users want the ability where most of the work in cleaning data and creating analyses can be done by the business users themselves and the analyses can update automatically from the latest data any time.

4. Features: Mobile dashboards that respond to voice commands, geo-fencing parameters and machine managed conditions are a requirement, not an enhancement these days.

5. Innovation in delivery: Natural-language-processing-based BI services are needed for voice commands, which are preferred by many executive-level users in our enterprise.

6. Artificial intelligence: Cognitive-learning-based data analysis is needed to work on complex, unstructured data generated by many devices and systems.

Through analysis of several different products, we found that Oracle Analytics Cloud would be a great partner in our analytics strategy for today and for the future as it supports several of our key requirements. Oracle Analytics Cloud provided a natural progression from OBIEE with the shortest time to value. In addition, it provided several other new features, functions and capabilities -- specifically, the fact that eventually cloud managed services would let us spend valuable time with our businesses in delivering more niche and innovative solutions.

“Today’s business users are data jockeys. Oracle Analytics Cloud provides user-friendly features to support their advanced needs out of the box.”



Prove Me RightA basic exercise that can provide more value than any other methods of experiencing the capabilities of Oracle Analytics Cloud is a proof of concept (PoC). At the City of Las Vegas, we built an analytics architecture with Oracle Analytics Cloud and did an elaborate pilot. This let us experience the product beyond the white papers and benchmarks. We built tiered use cases and a pilot to assess the product.

A tip: Have scenarios where data resides in the cloud, on premises or is federated between these environments when rendering analytics. They will bring out the power of Oracle BI server’s intelligent capabilities.

Exercises of this type also mitigate risks by validating your proposed architecture. The PoC provides ultimate value in building confidence with the product as well as recognizing the advantages and pitfalls that are ahead if you decide to migrate.

Build the Team When a decision is made to move to the cloud, a critical aspect ensuring success are new skillsets and a great team. Though it is still OBIEE at heart, Oracle Analytics Cloud requires a slightly varied architecture and support mechanism to manage your workloads. The migration also means a plethora of testing at various phases of the project. It is best to assemble a core group consisting of BI architect, BI developers, BI administrators, skilled members on quality assurance and a peripheral group consisting of network engineers, database and system administrators, usability engineers, project managers and external vendor / partners skilled in the migration. It was our entire team’s effort that made our project a success.

Choose Oracle Cloud Services As your enterprise might already have a well-oiled machine (OBIEE) with user acceptance and adoption, moving to the cloud with minimal disruption should be the goal. There are several considerations and decisions (requiring considerable thought) that need to be made. Here are a few important ones:Oracle Analytics Cloud offers several services that you can customize for your analytics deployment, as seen in Figure 1.

This is a great feature available in the customer-managed Oracle Analytics Cloud, which gives the power to the customer to make important decisions regarding deployment.

The key services that you can make decisions on are:1. Compute: Choosing a compute shape is critical. A choice

can be made as small as 1 OCUP to up to 52 OCPUs, with each having maximum row limits. Choose the best shape to suit your organization’s needs.

2. Storage: The cloud infrastructure object storage provides several containers that can be used to scale your instances.

3. Database Cloud Service: Provision a database service, which is essential for the functioning of Oracle Analytics Cloud. This database can also serve as a place where your analytics data resides.

A Word on Data Oracle Analytics Cloud provides rich and varied options to access analytical data. In enterprise deployments, one has multiple ways to access analytical data stores. A solid and working data strategy is going to play an important role in successful BI delivery. Oracle Analytics Cloud provides several options, especially in large organizations where there are complexities surrounding data residence. There are a few different ways to approach this depending on your organization’s data strategy.

“Good Data = Good BI.”

Data can reside fully on premises (on various databases, object stores) or entirely on cloud (Oracle Cloud or any other vendor’s cloud). Another option is that partial data can reside on premises and a portion on any cloud platform. The cloud-based BI server has the capability to mashup data between databases and platforms, providing an enterprise level data federation. In a more complex setting, it supports a combination of data to reside partially in several cloud vendors and on-premises data marts / data warehouses.

Figure 1: Several basic services that Oracle lets you customize.



Oracle Analytics Cloud provides flexibility and gives the customer the ultimate control over your important asset: data.

A Word on Networking Similar to options provided in accessing data, Oracle Analytics Cloud provides various solutions to access your data securely. A good networking topology between Oracle Cloud data center and your network is crucial for the cloud analytics to deliver superior results.

For many customers, analytics consists of sensitive data and analytics in the cloud, translating to data traversing through the public internet, which might be a cause of concern with respect to data security.

Involve your networking team in the initial stages of planning to architect and sort out the connections between your enterprise and the Oracle Cloud datacenter hosting your analytics cloud / analytics data stores. Oracle also can provide dedicated compute zones as a part of your organization’s network. Options like FastConnect offer high performance connectivity over a 1G link.

After going through all the options, the City of Las Vegas chose to go with a virtual private network architecture that provides encrypted data transfer between our datacenter and Oracle Cloud while extending our private network. This was also driven by our data strategy as discussed above as we hold several data sources that are Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) certified and share data repositories with several agencies.

Figure 2: Instant mobility added to heavily used dashboards.



Plan to Deliver Excitement Project “moving to cloud analytics” might be a good time to retrospect and make your dashboards work better. This is also an opportunity to spike new and renewed interest from the user community in your organization. One can strategize the move in the following ways: 1. As-is to As-is migrationThis strategy moves metadata objects, reports and dashboards into Oracle Analytics Cloud. This way, the cloud analytics functions will almost be the same as on-premises OBIEE. The benefits are upgrading to the latest releases of the software, infrastructure and time saved in maintenance.

2. Improved MigrationThis strategy, in addition to moving metadata objects, reports and dashboards into Oracle Analytics Cloud, adds minimal new capabilities such as new advanced ad-hoc capabilities, out-of-the box spreadsheet data manipulation capability and the ability to perform zero sign on, etc. Though testing and releasing these new features might require extra time, it also might prove to spark renewed interest in the application.

3. Migration with New Functionality / FeaturesThis strategy will support user engagement at its best, but also adds time and effort to the project. Creating data-visualizer-based dashboards in the cloud can be a great tool that embellishes existing content. Converting the top three utilized ad-hoc content into a data visualizer format enabling better usability and/or extending the mobile capabilities such as “Day by Day” in the initial release are some key ideas to step into Oracle Analytics Cloud. We added instant mobility to selected dashboard based on their usage and relevancy as seen in Figure 2.

The Experience 1. The lift and shift process migrates two types of objects:

• Security Providers, such as Users and Groups.• Catalog folders.

The migration of Catalog folders requires two steps: creating an export bundle from the on-premises instance using the migration tool, then importing the export bundle to the cloud instance to generate the transformed BAR file.

2. Customizations are the major drawback when using the migration tools to upgrade to Oracle Analytics Cloud. Careful consideration should be given to test any and all customizations. We made a master list and became quite experienced in effectively managing the curveballs in this area. A bit of OBIEE talent comes in handy.

3. Hybrid data sources (federations between data centers) may slow down the queries affecting dashboards. An active, in place data management and performance improvement strategy will save the day.

4. Configurations tag tweaks will have to be redone after upgrades and patches in customer managed solutions. Files such as NQSConfig, Instanceconfig and log configurations would need attention.

5. Initially, performance might look sluggish compared to the on-premises version, but there are multiple strategies to tweak it to bring it to the same or better level as the on-premises solution. For example, as seen in Figure 3, deferring most (if not all) session initialization blocks by checking the “Allow deferred execution” is a simple strategy that gives a great boost in performance.

Figure 3: Initialization Blocks deferred execution.

Figure 4: Several intuitive data visualizations and self-service out of the box..

Figure 5: Out-of-the-box machine learning for business users..



Success Oracle Analytics Cloud was, at times, a little challenging to migrate to, but we managed the challenge with great support from the Oracle team and our team’s effort to come together to make it shine. This resulted in a new, rebranded enterprise analytics solution with these great benefits:1. Futureproof: infrastructure + databases + applications in

the cloud.2. New and improved user-friendly visualizations (Figure 4).3. Instant mobility: making the dashboard responsive and

attractive in mobile is easy.4. Out-of-the box geo spatial functions: saves a lot of time and

effort. (Figure 6).5. Oracle Analytics Cloud is focused on self-service and is

user friendly.6. Oracle “show me my numbers”: voice activated analytics.7. Roll out advanced analytics or certain data mining

algorithms to users for self-service (Figure 5).

“More Time spent on innovation and insightful analytics, less on keeping the lights on.”

Summary Oracle Analytics Cloud provides next-generation cloud-based analytics solutions, which is the most natural progression of Oracle Business Intelligence. The migration process is straightforward, given all decisions and planning is commissioned correctly. Oracle, on the other hand, provides great support on the product in migrations and implementations.

There is a paradigm shift in analytics delivery that is more business user friendly even in accomplishing complex data manipulation and visualization applications. Oracle Analytics Cloud shines in advanced, user-focused, intuitive analytics, to which migrating will benefit your organization.

Raghav Venkat works extensively architecting the enterprise data and business intelligence systems at the City of Las Vegas. A data enthusiast, he is a regular presenter on data and BI topics at COLLABORATE and Oracle OpenWorld conferences.

Figure 6: Easier geo spatial analysis.



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